I don’t know if it’s true to the old saying, “disrespectful, familiar with contempt.” Among the many Italian film masters who stand on the same ground as the Vatican, the religious sentiment is very strong, but most of them have a strong political scent. There are a few exceptions. Roberto Rossellini is one, and Pier Paolo Pasolini is also counted, but the most notable one is Elmano O Ermi (Ermanno Olmi). Olmi actually has strong political opinions. He believes in Marxism, but he is also a Catholic at the same time. This may explain why, compared with other Marxist directors, his film is not angry enough. On the contrary, it is like unfolding a four-season country ballad. It is plain and hard, and even the sadness appears vague, if there is nothing.
"Geta Tree" is a 1978 movie and won the Palme d'Or in Cannes that year. Afterwards, Olmi was silent, I don't know why, maybe it's the quiet style, which didn't match the way of the past.
The film is three hours long. The actors are all serious farmers in Bergamo, Lombardy. They have terrible postures and undefended stares. All the dialogue is in the Bergamo dialect, so that they have to be screened in their own country. With Italian subtitles, it's a bit like watching "Flowers on the Sea" and "In the Mood for Love". To what extent is the Bergamo dialect different from Italian? When I watched the movie, I didn’t know it, but I just felt something was wrong. I asked the people who watched the movie together three times, are you sure that the Italian audio is loaded?
The story was told by Olmi’s grandmother. Four tenant farmers lived in a commune yard provided to them by the landlord. Two-thirds of the harvest was handed over to the landlord, and the remaining third was left barely supporting the family. You can't see his attack on society, but like a hymn of the tenacity and harmony of man and nature. The sacredness of life, the decent work, and the pursuit of the supreme spirit by the people who work on the earth are the themes throughout the film. If you want to see such themes from behind those poetic and plain pictures, it is the Christian spirit that cannot be ignored. Olmi instinctively despises pesticides like an organic farmer. He cultivates and harvests strictly according to the lunar calendar. Just as he is grateful for the gift of God when he meets the harvest, the Christian spirit shown in his movies is also an instinct, full of right or great or humble life. Love, a crazy and silly character that appears in almost all movies-"The poor man with nothing is the one closest to the Lord"-every harmless idiot is actually this idiot who lives in the northeast of Italy. The overflow of love of the hermits on the Goya Plateau.
"Geta Tree" is a picture of a country that has disappeared, with sorrow and hard work, simple happiness, and the natural rhythm of farmers. Below the camera I see moisture and quietness. The characters in the first half have no character at all, and the camera will occasionally slide past. With their fuzzy faces, these four tenant farmers are not so much close to the land as they are just a part of the land, the moon outside the window when people sit with people at night and tell ghost stories, and the rain that splashes in the pond in spring. Beads, the frozen soil block buried with chicken manure, are the same. They worked in the fields, slaughtered pigs and geese, women with a sad face washed clothes by the river, and young people chasing after the girls on the small roads in the village, surrounded by bare branches and pits. Trails, asking for a kiss "has to wait until the time it should come", like the season of sowing and harvesting, you can't be wrong.
The landlord did not become a "character", and even a part of this landscape painting was not worthy of it. He only used the opportunity of Christmas to connect the landlord's house with opera and chamber music; on the contrary, the director was from beginning to end. Use Bach's sublime as the background of farmers' lives.
The family and the church are the social cornerstones of "Wooden Clogs", loaded with the entire values, just like Bach’s music, which runs from the beginning to the end of the movie. It is a ringtone from heaven, telling everything that God is looking after these simple and humble. Beautiful life.
Such nostalgia and reminiscence are undoubtedly politically incorrect. In the eyes of the reformers, this reactionary is non-discriminatory, defending the old order, denigrating and obstructing progress; more people may only think that this is a pathological aesthetic.
But, isn't there still a softness to overcome the rigidity? This little boy named Minnek, because of his extraordinary intelligence, starts the movie with the priest persuading his parents to send him to school. Later, every day he wore clogs and walked a long way. One day the clogs finally broke. On this day, his mother gave birth to another little brother. Father’s silence was a fear of the future and another mouth that was waiting to be fed. He’s worried, where will he go to find a pair of shoes for his son to wear to school. The movie puts the cruelty outside the screen. At the end, the family is driven out and sitting on the carriage at a loss because my father cut a tree and made a pair of new clogs for Minnek, and the farm is full of plants and trees. It's all the landlord's. The price of this pair of new clogs is that the family say goodbye to the ideal farm, Xanadu. But where to go? Is this a hint of revolution? This is not Bertolucci's "1900". There is no open revolutionary, no speech, and its political views are in every detail of people's lives.
These hints are more than one. After the couple who hurriedly walked slowly on the country roads for a date, they finally got married and went to Milan for their honeymoon in a gondola for both passenger and cargo. The scenery along the way was picturesque, and the new wife restrained it. The flashing eyes were both restless and expectant. When I arrived in Milan, there was a sudden chaos on the street, and the street was as quiet as a white night. I thought that the film conversation had a turn, but it suddenly stopped, leaving this chaotic opening to the clear who has no ending. The Nek family, we don't have to face it. The scene shifted from a quiet village to a quieter monastery. The new couple received a gift from the gods. They adopted a boy in this orphanage, and the monastery provided cash for food and clothing until the age of fifteen. Orphans need parents, and poor parents can get an annual salary because of this orphan and get rid of poverty. Let us take care of each other, we are all children of God (nature).
In this world, only those who give love as a gift can be saved. The forms of love-fraternity, maternal love, sympathy, sex, platonic love, divine love-are all mixed with the only divine love, they give and obtain each other, subconsciously, only for salvation, salvation of the soul.
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