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ARTICLES - "Tavianis' 'Fiorile': a fable of the first order"

Tavianis' 'Fiorile': a fable of the first order by Jay Carr
The Boston Globe, May 13, 1994

When Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's "Fiorile" opened, last year, they recoiled from suggestions that its themes were linked to Italy's political upheavals. That was news, they said - and only when news dissolves into history or legend did they feel comfortable blending it with the element of fantasy that characterizes their most memorable films. Although it doesn't reach the level of their remarkable "Night of the Shooting Stars," "Fiorile" is of a piece with that film, "Allonsanfan" and "Kaos." Rewardingly, it taps into the folklore and rich pictorialism of the Tavianis' Tuscan heritage. It also blurs the line between anecdote and fable as it traces a two-centuries-old curse hanging over a family that prospered from the theft of a trunkful of Napoleon's gold.

It begins with a contemporary family driving through the Tuscan countryside to what's left of the family holdings - a crumbling villa where their patriarch is holed up in reclusive fashion. The family's name is Benedetti, but as the father explains to the two wide-eyed kids in the back seat, their fellow peasants renamed them Maledetti ("accursed") with derisive meanness after a brother steals the gold while a gentle and idealistic French lieutenant is making love to his sister in the forest. It means they're rich enough to buy land - but the cost is high. "Fiorile" takes its name from the French Revolutionary calendar's renaming of the month of May. It's also what the French lieutenant nicknames the peasant girl.

Part of the Tavianis' scheme is to keep us a little unbalanced by not always knowing what period we're in as they balance fact and its reshaping by generations of storytellers. The Tuscan landscape - glory of so many painters - is timeless. And when we see a road disappearing beneath the camera, we're momentarily unsure whether the view is from the contemporary family's van or from vehicles in the World War II episode. The Tavianis also have the lead actors resurface as the gene pool presumably asserts itself down through the years. Thus, the gentle Frenchman (Michael Vartan) is reborn as the sensitive wartime doctoral candidate drawn by love into the Resistance, involved in a brutal execution. Galatea Ranzi, the original Fiorile, returns at the end of the century as Elisa, who loves a local commoner.

The poor lover is manipulated out of the picture by her politically ambitious brother (played by Claudio Bigagli, who is also Fiorile's trunk-stealing sibling), and there's a strongly etched scene of retribution in a forest, involving mushrooms and toadstools. Long before the Tavianis bring their film to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, their theme emerges in the spectacle of a family destined to be forever divided by greed and love. Grand passions unfold in a distanced, dreamy manner amid the ghosts, the madness, the opulence, the light-handed but insistent linking of idealism and revolution. The Tavianis' camerawork, as usual, is gorgeous, and if the inspiration is only intermittent in "Fiorile," how many films have any inspiration at all?

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