La strada lunga un anno

The Road A Year Long was a labor of love for leftist Italian auteur Giuseppe De Santis, who prepared his epic, about peasants building a mountain road, for four years without getting any funding in his own country, only to finally receive support from the socialist state of Tito's Yugoslavia. It is a worthy celebration of collective effort: how a bold plan by an individual worker to help the economy of a depressed isolated area turns into a communal achievement despite at first the opposition of some comrades and for even longer the refusal of the town authorities (the mayor, the schoolteacher, the priest) to support and pay for the project. The workers are even imprisoned several times to obstruct the effort, though a daring refusal by the women to participate in church services and keep their children in school helps turn the tide, followed by a change of heart from the teacher who goes to listen to the workers and joins them. The film has an epic sweep of almost 2 and a half hours which is elaborated through dramatic use of long takes and the Scope format. De Santis, however, cannot resist an interest in the erotic and romantic complications of the characters, as he showed early in his career with Bitter Rice; this aspect of the film does add a specific human dimension to individual members of the collective but pulls the film at times into melodrama and stretches out the tension of the basic story more than it might need to.