BAARÌA

Baarìa is Sicilian dialect for Bagheria, a town near Palermo and the birthplace of the director Giuseppe Tornatore. Bagheria’s most famous son had long dreamed of recreating on film the town and townsfolk of his childhood but never really thought that he would be able to achieve this ambition. It would not, at any rate, happen before he was 60, he thought, because he would not be at ease with his own memory until then.

Yet with several years to spare Giuseppe Tornatore has created a monumental work which can be seen as a history not only of Bagheria but of Sicily itself from 1910 to the present day: Shot mostly in Tunisia, where the Bagheria of the 1960s has been so painstakingly reconstructed that Tornatore’s mother started moving all the furniture in “her” film house into the “right” positions, Baarìa tells the story of three generations of a family based on Tornatore’s. It is a story of ordinary people who espouse left-wing politics because they see it as the only way to improve their lives. “It’s a history of simple people – history with a small ‘h’”, explains Tornatore.*

The film cost just over €20 million, features 230 actors, 20,000 extras [or 35,000 according to some sources] and took 25 weeks to shoot. It makes a star of Margareth Madè and many famous Italian actors have cameo roles. The project is said to have given work to over 1,000 Sicilians and was chosen to inaugurate this year’s Venice Film Festival.

So you would imagine, would you not, that everyone in Italy is pleased and that Tornatore has been thanked and praised? Not by Giancarlo Galan, the President of the Veneto Region, who does not appreciate the venture at all. He said, after the Venice screening, that the film had bored him to tears because “Nothing happens until the end” [as if all films were action films] and then criticised the amount of money spent on it, accusing the Sicilian Region of investing public money in the film. This has been denied and the President of the Sicilian Region, Raffaele Lombardo, has, quite rightly, defended both the film and his Region, going on to accuse Galan of having "a phobia about anything produced south of the River Po". [Don’t you just want to bang men’s heads together sometimes?!]

The film has also been criticised for not being shot in Sicily [which is a fair point] for its use of dialect and for avoiding the issue of the Mafia.

It is true that here I am defending a film that I have not yet seen [it is to be released in Sicily at the end of the month] but I find it hard to believe that a work by the director of Cinema Paradiso and Manèla is boring!

Poor Sicily, always being slated by the north for being apathetic, then when for once it shows itself to be dynamic and enterprising, that is wrong too!

I’ll post about the film again after I have seen it. Meanwhile, there are fair reviews here and here.

* “È la storia che scorre, quella della gente semplice, la storia con la ‘s’ minuscola”. - Quoted in an article by Pietro Calabrese in Corriere della Sera Magazine, 3.9.09.

My non-linked sources:
Article: Tra amore e politica, un secolo in Sicilia in il venerdì di Repubblica, 4.9.09.
Article: La Mia Baarìa by Pietro Calabrese in Corriere della Sera Magazine, 3.9.09.
Il Giornale di Sicilia, 4.9.09.