Vento di terra

(Vincenzo Marra, Italy)

By Andrew Tracy

For all that the majority of critics still subscribe to some version of auteurism, there is within our oversaturated brains a point where our relentless taxonomies start to unravel, where the encyclopedic urge gives way to a pleasant fusion interrupted periodically by particularly vivid sensations: a shot here, a sequence there, a look or a single performance that briefly designates one film from another in the strange half-world of cinephilic memory. It’s ironic that the singular can blend in with so many other singularities, that a distinctive vision and method can be relegated to a genus by way of its very distinctiveness. In the past few years, Lucretia Martel (The Holy Girl, 2004) and Lisandro Alonso (Los Muertos, 2004) from Argentina, Naomi Kawase (Shara, 2003) from Japan, Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, 2002) from Scotland and, now, Italy’s Vincenzo Marra have all been classed within this writer’s particular mental index as a very specific breed of young director: not “fully formed,” as the cliché goes, but so deliberate in their technique, so sure of the direction in which they are moving, that watching their films is somewhat akin to witnessing the working out of a theorem.

Simile aside, there’s nothing dryly academic about any of these directors; their films are mysterious, sensual, even aggressively physical works. What groups them together despite their widely divergent tones and concerns is the clipped precision they evince even in their longeurs, the relentlessly focused intelligence which hovers above even the most seemingly inconsequential of scenes. This palpable and perpetual directorial presence could well crush the fragile schemas of the films, could descend into the possessiveness and tyranny that is the most prevalent version of auteurism in North America . Yet all these filmmakers maintain their balance (for now, at least) by remembering that the material they treat is larger than they are, that it is the hidden enormity of their deliberately small scenarios that first birthed the film in the mind. The circumscription of the films belies the heights of experience—social, political, sexual, emotional—which they depict. It is to these peaks that their distinctive efforts are directed, an exclusive vantage from which to survey the vastness which they share. Singularity, after all, can only be defined by way of commonality, and it is to the intersection of these respective immensities that the best of these filmmakers turn their discrete and rhythmic eye.

If one thing distinguishes Vincenzo Marra from the above directors, it is his emphasis on the tempo of the film rather than its plastic qualities. Vento di terra, his marvellously accomplished second feature, transforms familiar festival fodder of working-class difficulty and despair through the confident rhythm of his narrative, the concision and swiftness with which he moves through his story. Marra maximizes the emotional impact of each episode by studiedly reducing it to its bare, mathematical minimum, an almost notational rendering of a life and a world. The cumulative effect is anything but reductive. Each separate and distinct episode is slowly aggregated into a larger whole, which—finally, suddenly, and shockingly—is subsumed by a yet greater whole, a terrible and incomprehensible whole, outside the film’s visual and narrative frame. Marra’s careful selectiveness works in the service of a great exclusion, a seeming negation, which instead produces a strange, powerful dynamic that expands both terms of the equation.

This dynamic is effected by Marra’s subtle subversion of the basic filmic language—cuts, fades, dissolves—which he employs, the very conviction of his storytelling skills creating an acute feeling of uneasiness. That disquiet is already present in the film’s first two shots, a 360 degree pan across the skyline of Naples followed by a static close-up of the film’s protagonist, the teenaged Vincenzo (Vincenzo Pacilli). What seems at first to be a simple point-of-view shot, announcing the appearance of the film’s main character and grounding the story in his perception, is belied by the camera’s motion and the character’s stillness. The encompassing gaze of the camera cannot be that of this impassive figure, yet neither does the camera assume an omniscient, observational perch from which to view him. Vincenzo is neither the seeing nor the seen, neither the actor nor the case study, but something in-between. And it is to this same in-betweenness that Marra pitches his film, to the ambiguities which permeate even the most rigorously constructed narrative. The seamlessness of Marra’s ellipses, the graceful quickness with which he moves through his episodes, only accentuates the ruptures created by his cuts and dissolves. Not that the story is ever disorienting; it takes no more than a few seconds to figure out where we are and what has happened. But the speed with which we are shunted towards these points makes the breaches in between feel all the wider: the weight of the unseen slowly accumulating as the story cuts resolutely forward.

If all this sounds excessively formalistic, it’s only because Marra has so impeccably wed his finely honed perception to the emotional core of his story—Vincenzo’s desperate quest to support his family. Marra inscribes the beauty and terror of the familiar in sharp, vivid lines: Vincenzo’s mother, her body attuned to the jagged rhythm of the sewing machine running day and night to save the family from eviction; his father’s weary resignation suddenly cut off by his overtaxed heart, a scene all the more terrifying for its commonplaceness; a heist which yields some easy money but leaves Vincenzo spiritually broken. From there, Marra follows Vincenzo into the army, where the director expertly sketches the regimentation of arbitrary brutality in a scene where cadets are made to repeatedly run up and down a flight of stairs; on to a tour of duty in Kosovo, where an exchange of glances between an army patrol and a funeral cortege silently establishes the immeasurable distance between these two worlds; and finally the return to Naples, where that distance suddenly, unexpectedly closes.

Marra’s handling of this crucial and seemingly atonal turn is the culmination of his strategy, a radical shift in perspective—from the individual to the unseen many, the local to the global and political—which is nonetheless completely and naturally contained within the deceptively straight lines of the narrative. Marra neither reduces Vincenzo to a pawn in larger and uncontrollable events nor shrinks the events to fit within this one character’s limited field of experience. Rather, he leads us to the unknowable immensity of the global by evoking the unknowable immensity of the personal. “I want to change,” Vincenzo blurts out in the most introspective moment of the film, but it is his very inability to change that constitutes the true depths of his character. The predictability, the utter ordinariness of Vincenzo’s predicament testifies at once to his irreducible singularity and his universality, for in him is contained—not symbolized—an entire world afflicted with the same ills. As with Martel, Alonso, Ramsay, and Kawase, Marra’s strict and sure control of his tale is used to depict lives and worlds slipping out of control with a slowness and ease that makes the chaotic feel chillingly natural, inevitable. Individual crisis and global turmoil are as mutually exclusive and inextricably conjoined as any of these distinctive artistic worlds, requiring only a slight and precise turning of the lens to bleed the one into the other.

Vento di terra

Articles in this Section

Sin City by Adam Nayman

Vento di terra by Andrew Tracy

Night Watch by Eric Hynes

and in the magazine...

Grizzly Man by Geoff Pevere

BUY ONLINE

You can now subscribe to
Cinema Scope online, save 20% AND get a free issue!

 

---