That Kitchen-Sinking Feeling

Some girls are bigger than others, some girls mothers are bigger than other girls mothers, and some nationalisms are bigger than bastards.


I am no champion of British cinema. I think its mainstream is a sewer of cliches and stammers, while its "art" scene is equally trapped in the Hacknicon of "gritty realism." In Italy, it is a different story. Italy is the cradle of cinema, the cradle of imagination and innovation, right? Wrong.


How did it come to this. In the forties, Blasetti, Rosselini, and the great De Sicca kindled the neo-Realist revolution. As the fifties turned into the sixties, the golden generation of Italian film makers created a sort of westward expansion of the imagination. The names speak for themselves, its like fucking Vasari: Visconti, Antonioni, and the greatest film-maker of all time Federico Fellini. The seventies and eighties are seen as a desert of Italian cinema because they only spawned such triumphs of "high" and "low" cinema as, C'era una volta il West; the best films of Bertollucci; the truly special, Albergo degli Zoccoli.


And suddenly you look around and realise that this nation which has proudly looked out to sea for year after year, decade after decade, has become the most introverted cinema industry in the world. Italian film-makers now, make films about Italy. Often they are perfectly enjoyable, commendable movies. Gommora stands out, as does Sorrentino's il Divo. But often, too often, the most profitable of Italian exports are arduous, saccharine portraits of the political turmoil of post-War Italy and its impact on small town Italians. If I'm being a sentimental fogie, its only because I miss Italian cinema, when Italian was a synonym for imaginative.


All this is bringing me round to Giusseppe Tornatore. We all love Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. We really do, and it kills me to do this. His latest offering Baaria is a bad film and a symptom of something worse. It drawls on for two and half hours. This an empty film. One that we've seen a thousand times. One that constitutes a crushing, but by this stage familiar dissapointment.


I may sound hysterical in saying this. This development, I can only see as a twisted Fascism, in classically Italian mode. This is a young nation, turned in on itself. Triumphalist or ciritical, it constitutes a obsessive, nationalist, onanism. Even less forgivable, the movies it puts out are repetitive, masturbatory, dull. It makes me sad.