Fiorile

If you've been looking for a great story, beautifully told, watch this movie. Like many Italian films, it portrays truths that are absent the linear, "everything has to pay off" American cinema. The story drifts in and out of different epochs with clever transitions that would make David Lean jealous. The actors are uniformly excellent with special praise owed to the exquisite Galatea Ranzi.

This is a film that can be seen again and again and enjoyed each time for the new discoveries and pleasures that it brings.

Like all the Taviani Brothers films, this one looks great, but it is rotten to the core with false romanticism, and coincidences heap upon each other in some facsimile of a "story". In actuality, this is really just a sentimentally cheap tear jerker posing as an intellectually distinguished art film.

While taking an ethics course in undergrad, I mentioned instances of atrocities committed by people's ancestors and how the descendants try to atone for it. The professor noted that a person is not responsible for bad things that their ancestors did, no matter how hideous.

This topic is a large part of the subject matter of the Taviani brothers' "Fiorile", where a family visiting a relative discusses a curse placed on the family for a misdeed during Napoleon's invasion of Italy 200 years earlier.

We get this moral conundrum as well as some great shots of the Tuscan countryside. This is definitely a movie that you should check out if possible. I don't know if it's on any streaming service, so you'll have to look in neighborhood video rental stores (there's bound to be at least one in your city). In the meantime, I hope to see more movies from the Taviani brothers.

Fiorile (1993) was co-written and co-directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. The Taviani brothers are great directors, and their genius comes through in this unusual film. The plot starts off innocuously enough, with a young couple and their two children traveling in Italy to meet the husband's father. The family apparently live in France, and the husband has not seen his father for over ten years. The children are both under ten years old, so they don't know what to expect of their grandfather.

The father tells his children about a curse placed on their family because of an incident during the Napoleonic wars in Italy 200 years earlier. Gold is involved, and the subject of gold and the curse continues throughout the film. There's another episode in the early 20th Century, and a third during World War II.

Galatea Ranzi plays two roles--Elisabette in the Napoleonic episode, and Elisa in the early 20th Century episode. The two characters are quite different in temperament, but Ranzi is a good actor, and you believe her in both roles. (She is also very, very beautiful. You can see how a young French officer would forget his official military obligations in her presence.)

We saw this film on VHS, and it worked well on the small screen. Most of the action takes place indoors, or in small outdoor spaces, so a large screen isn't really required. This isn't a movie that you must seek out and see at all costs. However, if you can find it, it's worth watching.

I really enjoyed this movie, and am ever so happy I taped it at the time it ran on TV. The great thing about this movie is that it is so normal. A family driving to granny and telling the kids a story on the way. And then later how the kids are playing and weaving the story their parents told them in their play. I far prefer European films like this to the ones we get here from the states. Why, you wonder, well if this was made in Hollywood, an escaped gangster would have come along to steal the treasure and father would have taken revenge or something like that... No, the only thing that is a petty is that movies like this are not distributed main stream, but only in arty farty circles. So most movies like this will never reach main stream audience, or even will be distributed outside their originating country. I am pretty sure there are a lot of movies that are great, brilliant movies, but I will never get to see them, because of the distribution.

Pieter