Italian Fireworks

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI'S The Night of the Shooting Stars has all the qualities of a wonderful folktale--at once pungently earthy and dreamily fantastic. It unfolds to the leisurely rhythms of its own peculiar inner life and logic. It's a magical film, where the horrors of war, the crude beauty and humor of everyday existence, and the wonder of childhood all intersect in a flash of dream and memory.

The opening shot of a bright blue night pierced through by a multitude of lights, all giving off an unreal glow, is reminscent of other films that focus on three kings and a manger. The scene, however, is not Bethlehem but Tuscany, and the night is August 10, the night of San Lorenzo, when according to folklore, every shooting star grants a wish. A feminine voice intones solemnly and langorously. "What I wish tonight is to find words to tell of another night, many years ago. "So, in classic folk style, The Night of the Shooting Stars emerges at something recounted, an admixture of remembered, imagined, and overheard details.

The other night from the depths of time is in the late Summer of 1944, when the narrator Cecelia (Micol Guidelli) was a little girl in a flower print dress, and the Germany were slowly retreating through the fields of Tuscany under the onslaught of the Allies. The town of San Martino has been marked for mining by the Germans--each house crucified with a fatal slash of green paint--and the inhabitants have been ordered to gather in the Cathedral while their tiny community is to be blown up. A group of men, women, and children, under the leadership of the grizzled elder Galvano (Omero Antonutti), decide to break away from the huddled, frightened villagers and march out to grasp liberation rather than waiting for it timorously.

These are ordinary people forced into an extraordinary journey. They reject the comfortable complacency contained in the words of the village preacher. "If the Day of Wrath, the Dies Irae is near, and it is always near, then it is our duty to survive." Merely to survive is not enough; the risky quest to meet the near-legendary American soldiers is an opportunity to infuse a sense of adventure and myth into a cluster of lives grown grey and sodden under years of Fascist rule. So they make their way through the foothills, while the partisans and the straggling black shirted Fascists (looking like an army of scarecrows) wage skirmishes around them.

BUT THE FILM is no grim war epic--lest the Tragic muse settle over the events like a vulture, a wonderfully rough comic sense continually jostles it aside, and the two end up coexisting guardedly. Symbolic of the filmmakers' attitude is the scene in the beginning of the film when Cecelia, sitting in church, stares at the horribly gruesome fresco of the torments of hell on the wall--in response to the crosseyed anguish of one of the damned, Cecilia crosses her own eyes in delight.

These people are not the same as those that inhabit the Iliad (so beloved of Cecelia's grandfather). They do not rise to the heroism of combat. Rather, heroism descends to the level of their everyday lives. The ordinary gestures of masculine courtesy take on a grand sweeping quality, and the banality of names take on an almost ritualistic significance when the men in the group have to change their to join a band of partisans. One young man, in memory of his stint as a choirboy, picks the name Requiem--a poignantly appropriate choice, as later events reveal.

This work is full of vividly powerful but understand scenes that capture perfectly the heightened sense of ordinary life that the characters are leading. The entire group as they huddle around a tree listening for their village to blow up, think thoughts that range from the sublime ("And so our rosy San Martino fades away"--Galvano) to the ridiculous ("Oh God, let the houses blow up, I've never had so much fun" Cecilia), but the directors give them all equal weight. A woman, having broken off to join a group of Sicilan-American soldiers she believes are in the area, is killed by the enemy. As she dies, she imagines the young German soldier bending over her to be a member of her own clan, beckoning her to a mythical Brooklyn with the magic snow of a Statue of Liberty souvenir. And when Cecelia finally encounters the first real American soldiers, she cannot speak with them, so they make her balloons out of their supply of condoms to carry back to the group as a beacon of hope.

The climax of The Night of the Shooting Stars occurs when the group from San Martino, helping some partisans harvest a wheat field, is attacked by a band of Black shirts. What ensues is a grotesquely comic scene of carnage, as a lot of inexperienced people shoot at each other with pamcky clumsiness. A man runs into a childhood friend with a yelp of joy, only to riddle him with bullets: a girl embraces a long lost cousin in black shirt, but her husband pushes her aside with a rifle; both sides tending to their wounded, inadvertently borrow each other's water bottles, and Cecilia's eyes, widening in fright, transform the sorry spectacle into a fantastic combat of gladiators.

When the actual liberation ensues, reality and the quiet course of life gain the upper hand again. Things wind down to a slower pace, but for a brief period, the characters' lives have been woven into a mythic tapestry alternating somber patterns, with flashes of wild color. The patterns fade through time, but the colors grow ever brighter and more vivid in this marvellous cinematic folktale.