Sonetaula

(Italy, 2008, 157 mins)

35mm

Canadian Premiere

Selected Filmography:  

PRODS: Andrea Occhipinti, Gianluca Arcopinto
SCR: Salvatore Mereu
CAM: Vittorio Omodei Zorini,Vladan Radovic, Ivan Casalgrandi, Massimo Foletti
ED: Paola Freddi
Cast: Francesco Falchetto, Manuela Martelli, Lazar Ristovsky, Antonio Crisponi, Serafino Spiggia

In Sonetàula, the story of a young Sardinian shepherd (Francesco Falchetto) and his long descent into crime, vendetta and desperation, Salvatore Mereu (Three-Step Dance) has fashioned an epic of exacting intimacy, a story stretching from 1938 to 1953 that seems to take place in a single moment. Everything feels eternal; years can pass in a single edit. Important action takes place offscreen, but the sharply rendered details of a hard daily life become freighted with brooding significance and menace. The harsh limestone landscape of Sardinia is more than a backdrop here, its austere beauty and brutal weather make it one of the movie's dominant characters. And there is no escaping it: as Zuanne, whose trajectory is fixed when his father is jailed on a trumped-up charge, is cast further and further into self-exile, the landscape seems to swallow him up.

Mereu's neo-realism owes as much to Malick as it does to Pasolini: a layered visual density combined with an oblique, impressionistic storytelling style perfectly convey the tenuousness of Zuanne's life and the erosion of his ties with a society content to throw him to the wolves. Peasant life is neither horror show nor Marxist idyll--people behave well or badly mostly according to circumstance. The savage retributions of the vendetta seem as unchanging as the landscape. Authority is absent except when it oppresses. Following Zuanne through deserted windswept valleys and abortive human contact, showing him exposed and shivering in his pathetic hillside huts, Mereu's film manages to be both pitiless and deeply compassionate.

-- Peter Culley

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