Why this movie now? Not only to join the celebrations of WWI 100th anniversary.
At 83, one of the greatest contemporary
Italian directors, Ermanno Olmi, makes up his mind to direct a new “useful” movie, committed and lyrical at the
same time, which is a visual poem against all and any war.
War is absurd and terrifying. This is something Olmi has always been
convinced of, since he and his brother were made the addressees of
painful war tales by their own father, a veteran from WWI, who had
experienced the trenches in first person.
As Olmi states, all wars mankind has been involved in have
broken out for the interest of a few and at the cost of a great deal of
innocent lives. This and many other reflections have flown into the touching
script of his new work, “Torneranno i
prati” (The meadows will be back), a
committed movie which wants to prove the
old lie - dulce er decorum est pro patria mori - once again wrong. A movie that doesn’t want
to make a show but poetry out of violence and death, conveying what Wilfred
Owen called the pity of war.
Any war is made up of crimes against humanity.
Any war brings with itself an infinite deal of suffering and pain. Those who die are the immediate victims, for
those who survive it is, if possible, even worse.
This movie is the story of a group of young soldiers caught under metres of snow, in a
mountain outpost in Veneto, in the North of Italy, fighting for
their survival, struggling against a
virulent epidemy, the freezing weather, their enemy’s terrifying bombing, the
criminal orders of their superior and, last but not least, against their
haunting, inseparable companion, fear.
The first part of the story focuses on the figure of the
Captain , the captain of a ship sailing
nowhere, played by an extraordinary, touching young actor, Francesco
Formichetti. Feverish and weakened, the Captain recovers his strength to shout his “no”
to the absurd criminal orders the Major (Claudio
Santamaria) brings to his outpost. In a
moving, heartfelt rebellious act he
strips his military decorations away from his uniform in open defiance.
Unforgettable is his compelling order to report to him the names, not the
numbers of their casualties, what he wishes to know is the names of his dead
soldiers, each one of their names.
The most pitiful moments in this first part
are the scenes in which simple soldiers are ordered by the Major to carry a
broadcasting device through the no man’s land, in total awareness of the
inevitability of their deaths and of the complete uselessness of their attempts.
The most poetic scene is, instead, the soldier (Andrea Di Maria) singing in the moonlight to cheer up the trenches on both sides, rewarded by kudos in different languages and
dialects. The singing stands for hope, it is a dream of peace. But that soldier will
refuse to sing in the end: when there is no happiness in your heart, it is
impossible to sing, noboby would listen to your singing.
Once the Captain leaves his position, the command of the
outpost is entrusted to an inexperienced young Tenant (Il Tenentino), just arrived at the front with the Major. The young
Tenant, finds himself, by chance or
destiny, charged of incredible responsabilities
in a war he has only imagined and not actually known so far. He is another memorable character played by an
intense young actor, Alessandro Sperduti. The words his character writes in a letter to his
mother are piercing in their simplicity: with tears in his eyes he confesses he
feels so old after his first shocking
meeting with Death, the death of young people like him. His character is involved in one of the
deleted scenes that we could see in the backstage documentary directed by
Fabrizio Cattani, soon after the film. It is a pity that scene, who was initially meant to close the
movie, didn’t make it to the final cut. The young Tenant, hallucinating, gets to his enemy’s trench asking for help, waving a while scarf, and shouting “Where are you?” He will find no enemy in the trench opposite
to his own. His enemies are not there,
because those are not the real enemy. The real enemy is behind
him. His enemy is who sent him there.
We all have seen war movies before. Great ones, tough ones, moving and
unforgettables ones. What is special in Olmi’s new movie is that it doesn’t want to
be just another realistic show about the atrocity of war, but it's meant to be an evocative
picture of the human suffering which any war demands.
 |
| The actors answer the audience's questions |
Apart from the movie, what especially hit me was watching the backstage
documentary after the film. One of the most peculiar moments was Mr Olmi giving his directions to
the actors and asking them to not convey melancholy, sadness or pain but
innocence. The loss of innocence was certainly what most must have hurt those
poor young men. They had left their homes certain they were going to do extraordinary things for their country, but they were betrayed and
deceived and would soon discover that their sacrifice was frighteningly
aimless.
The film closes with a
small group of soldiers marching in the snow. They march toward their destiny
under a beautiful blue sky. In their future there’s still more pain: Caporetto,
the total defeat of the Italian army, is
ahead. As the title suggests, once the
war is over, the meadows will be back. Everything will be as if those atrocities
never took place. Especially not there.
I saw this beautiful movie - which is on in Italian cinemas these days - at the Barberini in Rome, in a special presentation to teachers. It was a compelling, enriching experience on the whole: to watch the film, to see the efforts behind the scenes in the documentary and to meet the brilliant young cast, Alessandro Sperduti, Francesco Formichetti e Niccolò Senni (see picture above)
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