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The Guardian
March 30, 1995
DIGGING UP ROOTS OF A FAMILY CURSE
by Derek Malcolm
THE FAMILY name is Beneditti and they come from Tuscany. They are travelling home to see grandfather and, as they reach the countryside the Taviani brothers so love to paint with the camera, father recounts the local myths surrounding their present prosperity.
With that, Fiorile, an attractive, rather rambling film, moves into history. First, it's the years of the Napoleonic occupation of the province when a handsome young officer (Michael Vartan), taking gold bullion to the French army, meets and falls for a young peasant girl (Galatea Ranzi) whose brother is thus enabled to help himself to the treasure. The officer is immediately sent for court martial and the romance ruined. Thus a family curse is born and the Beneditti are nicknamed Maleditti. A century later, the family force their sister to forswear her peasant lover with tragic results and, still later, her grandson suffers during the Nazi invasion of the second world war.
The film plainly means to illustrate not only the force of history upon individuals but the way those individuals repeat their mistakes from one generation to another. But it is a little too beautiful for its own good. Gone is the urgency of Padre Padrone and even the fiery lyricism of The Night Of The Shooting Stars is largely absent.
What we see now is something gentler, despite its evocation of Italian passions, where the atmosphere somehow dissipates the lesson the Tavianis intend to teach us.
That the film is a great deal better than all but the best, because the brothers are real film-makers, is unquestionable. But its summing up epilogue, during which family strains between father and grandfather suddenly begin to show, lends a dying fall that adds little and subtracts quite a lot. Somehow there's something missing.
Fiorile remains worth seeing, as an example of how it is still possible to make a film that means to do more than just entertain. I wish I could say, however, that it was more like the best of the Tavianis work than it actually is.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited
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