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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
March 11, 1994
AN ITALIAN FAMILY THROUGH THE CENTURIES
by Joe Pollack
FOR 200 years, through wars, political upheavals, family feuds, droughts, floods and the like, the Benedettis have been powerful, wealthy landowners in a Tuscan village.
The name means "blessed," but the community's luck has not always been good, so the villagers have often called them Maladetti, which means "cursed."
"Fiorile," a tale of the family's history, is an Italian film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, brothers and film makers who gave us the gentle and wistful "The Night of the Shooting Stars," but this story, lovely as it is, drifts into tedium as the brothers take far too long to make a handful of points.
The film is a series of flashbacks, beginning as Luigi Benedetti (Lino Capolicchio), his wife and their two children drive through the beautiful Tuscan countryside to visit the reclusive grandfather the kids never have met. As Capolicchio drives, he begins to tell the children the family history.
"Fiorile" was the name given to the month of May when Napoleon renamed the calendar, and it was the month when Jean, a gallant French lieutenant charged with caring for his regiment's chest of gold, falls for Elisabetta Benedetti, a lovely peasant woman he sees walking in the woods. He calls her Fiorile, but when they are overcome with passion, her brother steals the gold and the curse begins.
When the gold is not returned, Jean (Michael Vartan) is executed and, nine months later, Elisabetta (Galatea Ranzi) dies in childbirth, the first two statements of the curse. Meanwhile, the thief (Claudio Bigagli) hides the gold and uses it as the basis for the family fortune.
The curse comes to the fore in 1903, and again in 1944, and the Tavianis use the same actors to portray the family members through the generations, a nice touch.
But after the first episode, the others take far too long to get anywhere. The societal machinations of the 1903 sequence, involving Ranzi and the peasant she loves, unfold with agonizing slowness, from a fancy masquerade party to a hard-to-believe picnic, complete with poisonous mushrooms. The third episode, during World War II, involves partisans and firing squads again, and an odd triumph of the patrician when Massimo Benadetti (Vartan again) is pardoned.
This sets up the present, and the visit to Grandpa, which pushes credibility right out the window, though it certainly shows the persistence of the curse, right up to the final shot.
"Fiorile" is beautifully shot and nicely acted, with the various family members all performing the way they should, given the influence of the curse of the stolen treasure. But things are leisurely enough for a siesta along the way, without missing any of the plot.
© St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
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