Film review

La Notte di San Lorenzo

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1982)

A frame within a frame:  the opening shot, from inside a room, shows a window and a night sky outside it.  A woman’s voice explains that this is the night of San Lorenzo, aka ‘the night of the shooting stars’ – that if you make a wish on this night, a shooting star will make that wish come true.  The woman and the person to whom she speaks are unseen but this is evidently a mother addressing her young child.  The mother’s wish is that the child will hear what happened on a previous night of San Lorenzo (the tenth of August), years ago.  When a meteor plummets on cue, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani are using a piece of explicit artifice to get their story underway, as they did in Padre Padrone (1977).  How the brothers then proceed to tell the story of The Night of the Shooting Stars makes it very different from that earlier film.

The introduction has a fairytale flavour or might imply a bedtime story but what follows, despite some funny moments, is a gruelling, shocking tale.  One of the amusing bits comes right at the start of the narrative proper.  In a field, a young man in working clothes emerges from underground – from hiding.  A few people wait nearby with a set of clothes for him.  As he changes into a suit and tie, the young man grins at a young woman in another small group, watching from further away.  He is Corrado (Claudio Bigagli); she is Bellindia (Miriam Guidelli) and heavily pregnant; they and their families promptly walk together to a church, where the couple is married, the priest (Dario Cantarelli) expressing relief that they’re now man and wife and thereby saved from Judgment Day punishments for living in sin.  After leaving the church, the newlyweds join a group that is planning a journey.  It’s the summer of 1944:  the Allied advance into Italy is progressing apace; with rumours rife that the Nazis are about to destroy their town, a few dozen residents of San Martino, led by middle-aged Galvano Galvani (Omero Antonutti), prepare to walk to safety – to where the American army is in charge.  The Night of the Shooting Stars describes the stops and starts of this journey, an increasingly horrifying and exhausting ordeal that reaches its climax on the night of San Lorenzo.

In Padre Padrone the hero spends his formative years in a harsh, unyielding physical environment and under the thumb of a harsh, unyielding father (also played by Omero Antonutti).  Here, the use of landscape is more complex: the Tuscan countryside crossed by Galvano’s company is beautiful but also the site of carnage – of fellow countrymen killing each other.  The San Martino townsfolk are trying to dodge not only German firepower but also Italian Fascist paramilitaries.  Some of the would-be refugees are murdered by Blackshirts; some of the Blackshirts are murdered in return.  The Tavianis’ objective staging of these killings throws into relief the futility of human conflict (even in the context of a ‘just war’) and the reality of what’s on screen is often startling.  Characters repeatedly have to move so quickly that the actors actually lose their balance.  Nicola (Massimo Bonetti), like Corrado a deserter from the Italian army, has just returned to San Martino; when a black flag on a building happens to blow down and momentarily wraps itself round his head, Nicola’s terror is piercingly real.  It soon becomes clear that the way forward may be more perilous than staying put for expectant mother Bellindia.  Escorted by her own mother (Renata Zamengo), she retraces her steps and heads for the assumed security of a cathedral, where a bishop (Giorgio Naddi) says mass to a large congregation.  The camera, which has moved outside the cathedral when a Fascist bomb explodes inside it, remains static as the front of the building disintegrates and smoke billows forth.  Stunned and injured people then start to emerge.  Two priests drag out the bishop, who is dazed but physically uninjured.  Next minute, he and Bellindia’s mother are locked together in furious, hopeless attempts to revive the young woman, whose unborn baby dies with her.  They’re soon joined by Corrado whose concern for his wife has forced him to retrace his steps.

The few children among the travellers include six-year-old Cecilia (Micol Guidelli); we soon guess that this usually spirited, occasionally sulky little girl became the woman whose voice was heard in the film’s prologue.  (The voice returns, just two or three times in the course of the narrative, to confirm as much.)   The child Cecilia is the prime example of an approach to character far removed from that of Padre Padrone:  in The Night of the Shooting Stars, the Tavianis aren’t above romanticising, cutesifying and sentimentalising the dramatis personae.  With the help of some strong performances and presences, this makes the people in the story more engaging than in Padre Padrone although it works better in some cases than others.  A starving, half-demented man appears from nowhere to swipe the precious basket of eggs carried by one of the San Martino women; he claims his need is greater than hers.  He wolfs down a raw egg, revives, resumes his walk along an apparently endless road but soon collapses.  Another man in the group of travellers pronounces him dead.  The robbed woman goes back to the corpse and reclaims her remaining eggs before rejoining her companions.  While that’s an effective punchline, the egg thief himself doesn’t quite convince.  It may be true that a dying person will sometimes summon their last reserves of energy into a final, short burst of activity but the impression here is of an actor anxious to make the most of his brief time on screen.

Corrado, in contrast, is asked to bear a good deal of the film’s emotional weight, which the distinctive Claudio Bigagli shoulders well.  Just before Bellindia heads back, the couple discusses a name for their baby; assuming a boy, Corrado wants to name him for his late father but, when Bellindia asks the father’s name, he takes a while to remember that it’s Giovanni.  This comical amnesia and what immediately follow feel overworked:  as Corrado watches his wife turn and walk away, the long-held shot makes it too obvious this is the last time he will see her alive.  Yet the sequence pays off in a later one, where the surviving travellers sit in a circle and, one by one, give themselves a ‘fighting’ name:  needless to say, Corrado, who has rejoined the group, chooses Giovanni – now in memory of both his dead father and his own son, who never lived.  Later still in the story, Corrado holds at gunpoint a Blackshirt father and his teenage son.  The father begs in vain for his son to be spared and, once Corrado has shot the boy dead, wants his own life to end.  After some urging from his companions to put the father out of his misery, Corrado shoots him too.  As the determined, emotionally diffident Galvano, Omero Antonutti is allowed to give a much more nuanced performance than in Padre Padrone albeit the character’s eventual night of love with Concetta (Margarita Lozano), for whom Galvano has carried a torch for years, is unduly prolonged.  During this night, the US army liberates the area where Galvano, Concetta and their remaining companions have found temporary refuge.

The cast are an amazing-looking bunch – some faces notable for their eccentricity, others for their beauty.  How high the beauty standard is comes across almost comically in a conversation between Ivana (Norma Martelli) and the younger Rossana (Sabina Vanucchia), who remarks on  Ivana’s beautiful feet as the two women, on a break in the journey, sit at the edge of a lake and cool their legs in the water.  They’re the only beautiful thing about me, replies Ivana, although she’s good-looking enough – it’s just that her companion is lovelier.  Rossana herself has a tough romantic choice to make between Nicola, who’s as beautiful as she is, and his handsome pal Bruno (Mario Spallino).  In the end, the choice is made for her, tragically.  The loving bond between these two young men is understated but very real:  Bruno, first seen bandaging his friend’s injured foot when Nicola returns to San Martino, is eventually shown sitting beside Nicola’s corpse.  Beside these two, Corrado, with his irregular features, is no oil painting but he’s an arresting camera subject, even so.  So is Micol Guidelli whose Cecilia is as pretty as she’s zany.  You get the sense that this child actress is as much a card as the girl she’s playing, and the Tavianis give her free rein to perform.   It pays off because she’s so natural (it may have helped that Micol is one of five Guidelli siblings in the cast) – whether Cecilia is making crossed-eye faces or accidentally sitting on that basket of eggs whose owner thought she’d retrieved them safely.

Although The Night of the Shooting Stars has moments that call to mind Italian neo-realist classics like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), occasional surreal passages give it a one-of-a-kind quality.  (The film’s shifting styles set composer Nicola Piovani quite a challenge but his characteristically melodious music rises to it.)  In the most remarkable of these, Mara (Enrica Maria Modugno), a young Sicilian woman, suddenly runs off from the rest of the travelling party ‘to find the Sicilians’.  Seconds later, she’s shot in the chest, it seems fatally.  Mara comes to, is approached by Italian-American soldiers and talks with them in Sicilian dialect; she asks them to take her to Brooklyn; they agree, handing her a Statue of Liberty snowstorm as a music-box version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays on the soundtrack.  Mara smiles and goes back to sleep.  The figures of the ‘Sicilians’ turn into German soldiers:  ‘As well she died instantly,’ says one, perhaps the one who killed her.  That’s just what we first thought had happened – in which case, how come Mara has been talking to the Brooklyn soldiers?  Not quite as impressive, though it makes for a potent image, is a sequence in which Cecilia sees the Blackshirt who has just killed her grandfather pierced by the spears of an imagined line of ancient Romans.

In the Tavianis’ epilogue to the main story the camera returns to the room in which the film started, and where the adult Cecilia and her baby son now appear.  We may have felt that Cecilia’s narration of the story was rather artificial.  Her six-year-old self isn’t in a lot of scenes, which represent various points of view.  As the mother now explains to her child, the events of August 1944 may not have occurred exactly as she has told them; she insists, though, that this ‘is a true story’ and that ‘sometimes even true stories can end well’.  We’ve heard at a couple of points in the narrative a children’s rhyme – a piece of comic nonsense designed to ward off evil, chanted by the child Cecilia when her life is danger.  When the adult Cecilia repeats the rhyme to her sleeping infant, you wonder if you’ve heard it one too many times.  When she repeats it again, the effect is transformative – it seems to suggest you must never stop trying to sustain a protective spell.  This funny, bleak, discombobulating, hopeful conclusion sums up perfectly the combination of qualities in play throughout The Night of the Shooting Stars.

2 March 2024[1]

[1]  Afternote:  I didn’t know when I watched the film that Paolo Taviani had died, at the age of ninety-two, just two days previously.