The latest film by
Ermanno Olmi, a
dean among the Italian directors, was dedicated to the memory of his father and
to the tales of the First World War experience he made when Olmi was a child.
These tales resemble a kind of enlarging memory and legacy inside the
director’s mind, who is not new to this kind of historical operations. torneranno
i prati (“The Meadows Will Return”) is a short film all set in an extremely
advanced outpost of the Italian lines. The place is the enchanting mountain
plateau of Asiago (the place where Olmi lives now) and the time frame is
tightened to the last moments of war, when there was no doubt around among
soldiers about the real meaning of the carnage that was supposed to end soon
(only to stop for a while). "I thought there was a task to fulfil: that of
telling the great betrayal done to those people who have died and never knew
why. And with the dead and children, as we know, we cannot cheat", Olmi
said after the première and this declaration is enough to shape the real
intent of this work. The story alternates hectic bombardments and quiet, silent
and contemplative scenes but what the director prefers is for sure the
reconstruction of inner views and subjective perceptions of his group of
soldiers.
At a
cinematographic level the continuous presence of the moonlight is remarkable,
in contrast with the rockets making their contrail in the sky announcing the
bombardment and the proximity of death. A great attention is paid on the
parallel life of letters, correspondence, family photos and other personal
belongings but also a great effort was done to rebuild the linguistic
differences among comrades. An episode about the selection for a high dangerous
patrolling action includes a suicide and in the short time of this film there
is also space to depict the strange appearance of a new plague, namely the
Spanish flu, also known as 1918 flu, that turned eventually into an additional
tragedy and into a silent killer. Literary fathers of this latest work by
Ermanno Olmi are probably the writer Mario Rigoni Stern and Emilio Lussu, and
not only for geographical reasons: if the first spent his whole life in the
Asiago plateau and dedicated to the post-war period a book (Le stagioni di
Giacomo - “Giacomo’s Seasons”), the
second one is the author of probably the most important account that Italian
literature brought to life after the war, Un anno sull'Altipiano
("A Year on the Plateau").
Finally it makes sense to remember that last year torneranno i prati was the only Italian film selected for the Gala section of the Berlinale, Berlin's International Film Festival. And a quick note and plaudit is almost required for the music, too: the trumpet and flugelhorn player Paolo Fresu is far from simply putting a kind of trademark to the soundtrack (like many other musicians do when asked to create the soundscape of a film) and surprisingly coexists with Olmi’s spirit. You cannot ask more to a music for such a film and to music for films in general.
Finally it makes sense to remember that last year torneranno i prati was the only Italian film selected for the Gala section of the Berlinale, Berlin's International Film Festival. And a quick note and plaudit is almost required for the music, too: the trumpet and flugelhorn player Paolo Fresu is far from simply putting a kind of trademark to the soundtrack (like many other musicians do when asked to create the soundscape of a film) and surprisingly coexists with Olmi’s spirit. You cannot ask more to a music for such a film and to music for films in general.
