Aspromonte - La terra degli ultimi

We all know the masterpiece by Francesco Rosi, "Cristo si e' fermato ad Eboli". A Northerner educated man, finding himself in an isolated remote mountain village in the deep south of Italy. A city person learning what it means to conduct an agrarian life, with crops and farm animals, and little modernity and sophistication. In that film, the only "educated" person in the village is the priest, representing the institution of the catholic church, as to provide guidance in the meaning of life.

So, here too we have a Northerner that comes from the North into the South. And here too we have a priest. And we have peasant population, with their crops, farm animals, hand tools, and basic necessities.

But, unlike Francesco Rosi's masterpiece, this film is ineffective in rendering the same emotional and artistic value. Even the shooting scene is so amateurish that a graduate student must have choreographed it. Had they had a young Sergio Leone from the early 1960s on staff, that shooting scene would have been much different and more realistic.

The entire film felt like it was a dud. At the end, a line of text appeared on the screen: "Dedicated to the people of Calabria". There were a few people from Calabria in the audience, and they weren't clapping. So, no thanks.

As Cheyenne says about Harmonica, in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West", "He not only plays, he shoots too". Here, they just play, but don't know how to shoot.

The setting is a remote village in Calabria where, six years after the end of the Second World War, the inhabitants live in misery. Transferred teachers who do not stay, no doctor (a woman in childbirth has just died for this reason), it is the end of nowhere. Hope is reborn for a moment when a teacher (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, more sober than usual) comes to fill the post with the idea of transmitting emancipatory knowledge, and even more so when the villagers unite to build a road connecting them decently to the capital in the valley. Unfortunately, these positive forces are quickly flouted by the armed opposition of a local tyrant (Sergio Rubini, chillingly arrogant and brutal).

From then on, despair takes over again and all the ingredients seem to come together to produce an awfully depressing story, either in the form of a Greek tragedy or a dogmatic Manichean political film. Or else of a whiny melodrama with complacently spread out pains, underlined by a thousand violins. Fortunately, this is not so. Thanks to Mimmo Calopresti, a native Calabrian, who excels in both documentary ("Alla Fiat era cosi", 1990; "Where is Auschwitz?", 2005) and fiction (nobody has forgotten "La seconda volta"). For his new film, Calopresti refuses to enter a particular genre. His ambition is higher: in "Aspromonte" he tries nothing more or less than to achieve a perfect synthesis between the different possible approaches to the subject.

To begin with, no undue miserabilism: the sobriety of the tone never prevent the viewer from feeling the effects of poverty fully. No need to spread them out flat, the director instead moves forward delicately, with small touches (the difficult climbing up of the steep hill by the teacher opening the film, the discovery of the interiors and their minimalist furnishings, the rain and mud, etc.). At the same time, he never forgets to sing about the beauty of the natural environment, infusing the audience with his love of the place. Assisted by an excellent cinematographer (Stefano Falivene), in total harmony with him, Calopresti portrays the landscape with a palette of colors that do justice to the vegetation, the stone and the sea below.The wide screen and fluid camera pans make us move smoothly in this setting as wild as it is beautiful. Which, by contrast, will make the abuses to which the inhabitants will be subjected all the more intolerable. To insist heavily would have been counterproductive.

No political partisanship either. Of course, this is a committed film, which chooses its side, that of the oppressed. But it does so without slogans, without disembodied speeches. It is a fact that Mimmo Calopresti always prefers the warmth of humanism to the coldness of ideas, generous as they may be.The characters in "Aspromonte" are first and foremost flesh-and-blood people, with their strengths and weaknesses, their unselfishness and their prejudices, not living clichés or ideas on legs. And this is as true for the grown-ups as it is for the children (You won't forget anytime soon the young actor playing Andrea, the son of the protest leader).

Based on real facts (the case of Africo, made public by a famous 1948 report) as well as on the novel by Pietro Criaco, another Calabrian by birth, this touching, not to say poignant, film, performed by a remarkably homogeneous cast, is a total success in that it manages to bring together in a single work documentary and fiction, psychology and sociology, political commitment and humanism. One must be called Mimmo Calopresti to have achieved such a feat and... "Heart of Stone" to resist all its beauties.