Assandira

This is a fifth movie of the Sardinian director Salvatore Mereu. Here, like in other of his works, he bases the story on a book Assandira by Giulio Angioni, a famous Sardinian writer. Basically, the subejct is the forced interaction between nature and business (or human cravings?). The story is told by an eldery shepherd Costantino who is destroyed by the immense grief of the death of his only son in a large fire of their commonly-run agritourism or holiday farm property. Step by step he tells the police investigator how and why everything happened. Everything started when his son and his son's wife, a foreigner (german), return to Sardinia and persuade Costantino to restructure his old farm house and make there a holiday farm for european tourists. Costantino initially does not want it as feels tourism being trivial to what really means a shepherd's hard life on the country. The story is rough, sensual (excellent german actress Anne Konig) and, apart from Sardinian specific shepherd culture, touches upon lots of general antrophological and social issues. For example, how humans misuse nature (not only as shown here, just think of all the million ways) and how trivial sometimes may be ideas for tourism not respecting the history and values of the territory. However, in the last half an hour the movie derails its gripping crime noir way and falls into a dark thriller with quite shocking ending you may not expect. I personally found this final part of the movie exaggerated and scary which by large part cancelled the very high quality noir lasting one hour and a half. I stress the very good casting, almost perfect. The lead actor, 81 years old Gavino Ledda, has really done a masterpiece. Another interesting thing is that a lot of actors you see in the movie are not professional. Some have done it for the first time.