A Journey on the Screen
Baarìa is an epic drama, which tracks down five decades of the life in the small town of Bagheria near Palermo, Sicily. The town in local dialect is known as Baarìa.
Giuseppe Tornatore‘s film focuses on Peppino, a shepherd’s son. Peppino isn’t massively compelling as a character in his own right, but the three actors who portray him do their best to make him interesting, as he grows from a boy to an attractive man, to a member of the local Communist Party, marrying the local beauty along the way.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, from Cicco to his son Peppino, and down to his little grandson Pietro, Baarìa is a saga filled with characters who are haunted by passions and utopias that make them true heroes. The spectator gets a glimse of these characters through their loves, dreams, and disillusions, this amusing and nostalgic fable paints the portrait of a tiny Sicilian community, a microcosm where the universal drama of mankind plays out.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Italy 2009 – 150 min. – in Sicilian and Italian with English subtitles
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LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
MORE INFO
GIUSEPPE TORNATORE
After staging two plays by Pirandello and De Filippo with an amateur dramatics company at just sixteen years of age, Tornatore took his first tentative steps in the world of cinema through documentaries (one of these, Ethnic minorities in Sicily (Le minoranze etniche in Sicilia), won him an award at the Salerno film festival, and television work (for RAI he produced Portrait of a thief (Ritratto di un rapinatore), Guttuso’s diary (Diario di Guttuso), Sicilian writers and films: Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Vitaliano Brancati, Leonardo Sciascia (Scrittori siciliani e cinema: Verga, Pirandello, Brancati, Sciascia).
In 1984 he was second unit director on Cento giorni a Palermo by Giuseppe Ferrara and, two years later, finally made his directorial debut: The professor (Il camorrista) (1986), a hard-hitting portrait of a Naples underworld boss, is a sturdy, inspired work that successfully combines political considerations and spectacular scenes.
Nonetheless, it was with his next film that the young filmmaker was to attain success and recognition, thanks also to the superb insight of producer Franco Cristaldi: Nuovo cinema paradiso (1988), which went on to take the special jury prize at the Cannes film festival and the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 1990.
Tornatore strived to build on its success, but disappointed with Everybody’s fine (Stanno tutti bene) (1990), A pure formality (Una pura formalità) (1994), The blue dog (Il cane blu) (1991). The starmaker (L’uomo delle stelle) (1995) heralded a return to that Sicily of bygone days, where in the immediate post-war period a confidence trickster organizes bogus cinema screen tests upon payment, cheating poor villagers out of the little money they have. The legend of 1900 (La leggenda del pianista sull’Oceano) (1998) adapts the Alessandro Bariccio monologue Novecento. Malèna (2000) is another film set in Sicily, this time in 1940: it tells of a young boy’s erotic obsession with an older, recently widowed woman, and is good in parts, but does not succeed in doing what Tornatore almost certainly set out to do – portray an entire era and mentality.
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