Like a Fish Out of Water

Film: Cristo si e Fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli); Local Hero
Format: DVD from NetFlix (Eboli and from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library (Local Hero) on laptop.

I knew in the first couple of minutes of Cristo si e Fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) that this was going to be one of those films that I struggled with. It wasn’t specifically going to be an incredibly difficult watch per se, but I knew that when it came to writing about it that I was going to have a very difficult time. This is a film to point to as an example of one in which the majority of the action is internal. It’s a series of conversations more or less, and I’m being generous when I say that the majority of those conversations are dense and pretty turgid.

And that’s the issue with this film. Not much happens. Rather than having a plot summary, it has a plot sentence or two. Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonte) is a writer and artist, but also has a medical degree. He is arrested by Mussolini’s forces in the mid-1930s, and is exiled to a remote Italian backwater. He finds the people there to have been overlooked in almost every advance made in the last few centuries and decides to start practicing medicine to help the people as much as he can. That’s pretty much it, and this film runs almost 150 minutes.

Ken, Tom, and Me

Film: Tre Fratelli (Three Brothers)
Format: DVD from Mitchell Multimedia Center Northwestern University through WorldCat on laptop.

I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find a film that is deceptively simple. Tre Fratelli (Three Brothers) is a strange little film with a very simple premise, but it takes that premise in some interesting directions. I had no idea what to expect with this film, but found myself surprisingly involved with it. It may be as simple as the fact that I am one of three brothers, each of us born about five years apart, and that like our protagonists here, the three of us are very different in many ways.

A farmer named Donato Giuranna (Charles Vanel) sees his wife (Gina Pontrelli) and has a short conversation with her. She then stands up and walks away, waving goodbye to him. We soon realize that she was not waving goodbye; in a moment close to magical realism, she has died, leaving the old farmer alone. He sends off telegrams to his three sons, who respond by returning to the old farmhouse to pay their last respects.