Fiorile Reviews

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's rich, distinctive period drama about a family curse was filmed in, and based on a legend from, their native Tuscany in Italy. Raised and living in Paris, Luigi Benedetti (Lino Capolicchio), his French wife (Constanze Engelbrecht), and their two children are on an auto trip to visit Luigi's reclusive, possibly mad father Massimo (Renato Carpentieri) in Tuscany. At their hotel, the children overhear chambermaids referring to them as the "Maledettis," the "cursed." In response to the children's questioning, Luigi recounts the local legend that gave them their family nickname. As he does, the children gaze out the car window, and the tale comes magically to life. In the late 18th century, a Napoleonic battalion passing through the Benedettis' village stops to rest. While guarding the battalion's payroll gold chest, Jean (Michael Vartan) is beguiled by Benedetti daughter Elisabetta (Galatea Ranzi), whom he nicknames "Fiorile," after the name given to the month of May in the French Revolutionary calendar. As they make love, Elisabetta's brother Corrado (Claudio Bigagli) steals the chest; martial law dictates that Jean must be executed for losing it. Elisabetta makes Corrado swear to take revenge on the thief, but dies in childbirth without knowing the truth. The tainted money now bears a curse. In 1903, Benedetti descendant Alessandro (Bigagli) uses the stolen gold to bribe a local peasant family to separate their son Elio (Giovanni Guidelli) from Alessandro's sister Elisa (Ranzi). When Elisa learns what Allesandro has done, she murders him with poisoned mushrooms before dying while bearing Elio's child. During World War II, Elisa's grandson Massimo (Vartan) falls in love with beautiful Resistance fighter Chiara (Chiara Caselli) and joins the partisans. They are arrested and separated by the fascists, but Chiara dies, bearing Luigi, without knowing that Massimo was released from jail because of his family's wealth and status. After frittering away most of his family's ill-gotten fortune, Massimo has come to his present state, and the children, upon meeting him, suspect there's more truth in the legend than Luigi admits. When the children, and then Luigi, nervously refuse the mushroom dinner Massimo has prepared for them, he bitterly orders them from his house. Driving back to Paris the next day, Luigi tells his wife that he won't sell their Tuscany property, but will leave it to their children. In the back seat, Luigi's son clutches one of the original gold coins he found while searching Massimo's house the night before. There are no big stars, big budgets, or big concepts in evidence in this allegorical family saga, and it can't easily be categorized. The Tavianis' unpretentious feeling for peasant life seems to place them within the neo-realist tradition, while an implicitly Marxist theme--the corrupting influence of unearned money--underlying a lushly rendered, straightforward narrative, feels more like Bertolucci. But that doesn't easily accommodate the Felliniesque touches in FIORILE, like Elisa's lover Elio masquerading as a woman to facilitate their secret love affair. Even a suggestion of Bunuel can be detected when Jean's passion for Elisabetta is aroused as he glimpses a flesh wound on her upper thigh--a wound received, significantly, during a skirmish between the soldiers and local nobles, who have no use for the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Also, the Tavianis' facially romantic style is tempered by moments of judicious distance--typical is the scene of Jean's execution, which isn't shown directly, but through the anguished reaction of his best friend. Throughout, FIORILE is much more about the "bad" Benedettis, descending from Corrado, than about the "good," descending from Jean. While the "Corrados" dominate the foreground, Jean literally and figuratively haunts the background, a reminder of how hard it is to live, and how much harder still to live virtuously. Though the Tavianis have confounded critics, and possibly their audiences, by refusing to be pigeonholed, FIORILE is anything but "difficult." Rather, it is characterized by a sensual beauty, punctuated with memorable moments of power and poignancy, that make it a wonderful film to watch, even if it is a tough film to file away. (Adult situations, nudity, violence.)