Baaria (2009)

Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria arrives with the full weight of a national epic, following three generations of a Sicilian family from the 1930s to the 1980s. Peppino Torrenuova herds sheep, joins the Communist Party, marries against the wishes of his beloved's family, and spends a lifetime agitating against landowners, mafiosi, and the corrupt men who wear his own red colors. The camera loves the town even as the town suffers. It is a film about hunger, fascism, and disillusionment, told with the sweeping sentimentality of a director returning home.

The political spine here is unmistakably class-conscious. Peppino's communism is not a costume; it structures his marriage, his career, and his eventual disappointment. The rich are venal, the powerful are compromised, and the poor are ground down by an economic order that has no use for them. That earns the film a healthy measure of anti-establishment fervor. Yet it never preaches. The ideology is lived, not recited, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. A daughter's mini-skirt rebellion briefly rattles the patriarchal furniture, but the women here remain wives and mothers first, and the film has no interest in pressing the point further.

On the modern markers, the cupboard is bare. The cast is uniformly Mediterranean, the social conflicts are regional and economic, and no contemporary identity politics intrudes on the proceedings. What remains is an old-fashioned leftist melodrama, handsomely mounted and faintly exhausting. Tornatore wants us to feel the century pass. We do. We also check our watch, but we do feel it.