Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
What are we to make of L’Albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs)? This is a film that runs just shy of three hours (178 minutes and change) and a great deal of the first part of this film—actually all of this film—is about setting up the time and the place and creating an entire world around the simple lives of the peasants who populate the film. In truth, the entirety of this epic can be summed up in a sentence or two, but reducing the story to a couple of sentences would remove the importance of seeing these lives and learning about the people who live them.
But really, the story is as simple as it gets. The main story of the film boils down to this: A peasant family in Italy at the end of the 19th century has a son who appears to have some gift for learning, so they send him to school rather than put him to work on the farm. One day, the boy breaks his shoe on his long walk home from school and the family does not have enough money to get him a replacement, so the father (Luigi Ornaghi) chops down a tree on the property of the man who owns the farm where the peasants work and live. Eventually, this leads to problems, as cutting down the tree is akin to stealing from their employer. That’s really it.
