Film review

  • The Tree of Wooden Clogs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’albero degli zoccoli

    Ermanno Olmi (1978)

    A coincidence:  just before seeing Ermanno Olmi’s film, I’d read a piece by Francis Spufford, in his True Stories collection of articles and lectures, praising the horizons-expanding power of books.  This is a familiar theme within the Spufford corpus (vide The Child That Books Built) but its reiteration is refreshing at a time when cultural fashion insists – more and more insistently – that people need to see themselves ‘represented’ in what they read or watch on screen.  The Tree of Wooden Clogs is set in rural Bergamo, Lombardy, at the very end of the nineteenth century.  Its central characters are four peasant families who scrape a living off the land; the income deriving from their work as tenant farmers is mostly destined for their landlord’s pocket.  The one major episode of the story set in town rather than country follows two members of this group – a young, newly-married couple – to Milan, on a mission to adopt a foundling from a nunnery.  The child will guarantee its adoptive parents a regular income – a kind of family allowance – throughout its early years.  Olmi (1931-2108) was born in Bergamo and grew up in Milan but in social circumstances very different from his characters’.  The lives he describes are even further removed from those of most audiences who’ve seen and will see his film.  That distance is a big part of what makes The Tree of Wooden Clogs so illuminating.

    There are some difficult consequences to entering this world, especially for a viewer coming to the film for the first time (as I was doing) more than forty years after its original release.  Chief among these is the treatment of animals on screen.  The Wikipedia article’s warning of ‘real footage of a goose and pig being killed’ hardly prepares you for it.  The bird’s execution is over quickly; the pig’s isn’t, and its terrified screams are gruelling.  Later on, one of the characters happens to find a gold coin, which he decides to conceal inside his horse’s hoof.  When, unsurprisingly, the coin is dislodged and lost, the man blames the horse by striking it repeatedly.  It’s another suffering animal that brings into sharpest focus a different foreignness – the power of the Catholic faith that sustains the community.  Much of the livestock kept by the tenants belongs to the landowner.  When an exception, a cow owned by one of the families, falls ill, the local vet is called urgently and delivers a cursory, gloomy prognosis.  The materfamilias, after praying in church for the cow’s survival, feeds her holy water.  The animal survives.

    ‘A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.  That is the purpose and nature of miracles.  They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them.  That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles.’

    The cow miracle brings to mind those words, spoken by the Archbishop of Rheims in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan – except that the woman in Olmi’s film seems to find the answer to her prayers a wonderful and a simple matter.  The religious disposition of The Tree of Wooden Clogs is devout yet unsentimental.  A woman giving birth has the serene expression of a Madonna but the baby is another mouth to feed.  The peasants believe that God will provide but use their own ingenuity to ensure that happens.  The elderly Anselmo grows tomatoes each year to sell to local grocers.  As do others – so Anselmo, assisted by his little granddaughter, decides to plant the seeds earlier than usual to gain a competitive edge.  The plan pays off (though it’s unclear why he’d not thought of it before).

    The Tree of Wooden Clogs covers a year, illustrating the changing seasons and the established annual rhythms of the families’ lives.  Olmi thus returns two or three times to the progress of Anselmo’s tomato crop but another recurring theme – the focal point of early scenes and the root cause of the closing ones – makes for a less happy ending.  The farmer Batisti faces a dilemma.  One of his children is reckoned by the local priest bright enough to attend school – something no other member of the family has hitherto done.  The reassuring priest persuades Batisti that he should allow his son an education.  Each day, the boy completes a long solo walk to and from school.  In winter weather, his footwear disintegrates.  Batisti cuts down an alder tree from which he makes his son a pair of wooden clogs.  When the landowner discovers what has happened, Batisti and his family are evicted.  Their neighbours mourn their departure but not much else will change in the cascina.  New tenants will move in.  Work and rest, birth and death will go on as before.

    In addition to the Milan excursion, there are scenes outside the farm and its environs at locations such as a fair and a public meeting, where a political radical makes a speech.  Although this is given Private Eye contd p 94 treatment, presumably to suggest how little the speech interests the peasants in the crowd, the moment serves as a reminder of a nearly contemporary, almost diametrically opposed magnum opus of Italian cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci’s decidedly political 1900 (1976).  The English subtitling of the Italian dialogue (mostly in the Bergamasque dialect) in The Tree of Wooden Clogs is somewhat sparse, giving the gist rather than the detail of what’s being said.  The soundtrack also includes church bells and Bach organ music.  The latter – on the face of it, a surprisingly sublime choice – seems to reflect the film-maker’s view of his characters, despite their indigent circumstances, as in a state of grace.  As well as writing the screenplay, Olmi did the cinematography.  This is an instance where the use of natural light is both apt and satisfying.

    Olmi’s decision to cast non-professionals, including some who actually make their living on Lombardy farms, also pays off handsomely.  He could have searched the ranks of pro actors for years and not come up with the magnetic collection of faces assembled here.  Besides, the cast aren’t simply being themselves.  Even allowing that the pace of change in rural communities has continued to be much slower than in towns and cities, it’s hard to believe their way of life hasn’t altered at all in the interval of eighty years between the setting of the story and the making of the film.  The performers must have drawn on imagination as well as personal experience to animate their characters.  Untrained actors may not be the only reason why the film has drawn comparison with Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s but the style and structure are very different from, say, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948).  Where the De Sica narratives are succinct and eventful, Olmi’s storytelling is unhurried and often descriptive.  He moves easily between quasi-documentary and drama; it’s a hallmark of the film that the more dramatic moments, when they do occur, never feel forced and gain impact from matter-of-factness.  At just over three hours, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is longer than Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves put together but Ermanno Olmi doesn’t waste a minute.

    29 October 2021

  • Running Naked

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Victor Buhler (2020)

    Matthew McNulty is remarkably truthful and engaging in this odd little film (available on Amazon Prime Video), despite the shaky script.  (Hard to pinpoint responsibility for that:  IMDb gives writing credits for Running Naked to Victor Buhler, Jennifer Knowles and Michael Knowles, ‘based on a screenplay’ by Matthew Ehlers, ‘after a story’ by Rob Wales.)  As young teenagers, Mark Doherty (Samuel Bottomley) and Ben Taylor (James Senneck) are neighbours on a cancer ward, where they become best mates.  Their acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) goes into remission.  Sixteen years later, Mark (McNulty) is an oncologist in the same hospital while Ben (Andrew Gower) is a hopeless case, toiling in a subterranean office job and slave to wide-ranging OCD.  Mark’s in a relationship, though it’s on the verge of collapse, with fellow medic Jade (Rakhee Thakrar).  Ben has no hope of a girlfriend.  The only entries on his calendar are his (late) mother’s birthday and weekly evening meetings with Mark.

    Those with AML in early youth run an increased risk of its returning when they’re adults.  The two friends have annual blood tests to check there’s no recurrence of the condition.  Mark takes the sample from Ben in his flat because Ben won’t set foot in a hospital.  Their latest tests deliver bad news for one of the pair, which triggers a carpe diem drama-comedy (the comedy is pretty strenuous) that concludes with one protagonist dead and the other changed for the better.  All that is only to be expected but Victor Buhler – whose work has mostly been in American TV documentary and whose first (non-documentary) feature Running Naked is – took this viewer, at least, by surprise as to which way round the story would go.

    Two potentially strong elements in the set-up are the enduring strength of the bond between Mark and Ben, and the former’s theory about the source of the latter’s multiple neuroses.  For a while, it’s intriguing that Mark – who’s spent years in medical school, has good looks, social skills and a demanding job – still makes room in his calendar for his old friend.  Worrywart Ben, with an unfortunate comb-over and clothes the colour of cardboard, is unrecognisable from the humorous, animated teenager of the film’s prologue.  Mark reckons Ben changed the day he learned his AML was in remission and became inordinately anxious to keep it there.  Over the years, Ben has ratcheted up his self-protective strategies to the extent of making his life not worth living.  When the dire annual test results come through, Mark makes Ben leave his job and start having some fun.

    The big weakness of the screenplay is the gradually emerging premise that Mark’s life has turned out to be as paralysed as Ben’s – this can’t be so, given what’s happened since they were teenagers.  Mark does have two scenes – one at each end of the film – with a young AML patient he’s treating (Brandan Power).  In the first, he seeks to reassure by talking of his own teenage struggle with the disease; in the second, the boy’s AML is in remission.  Otherwise, Mark might as well be doing Ben’s dreary job for all that being a doctor means to him.  It doesn’t even occupy much time; when the moment comes to embark with Ben on bucket-list activities, Mark virtually stops going to work.  Running Naked is set in Stoke in Trent in the present day – or nearly the present day, since it’s plain to see shooting took place pre-2020.  Mark isn’t the only under-employed member of NHS staff – they mostly just stand around the hospital (the sequences there might have been shot by a Covid conspiracist).  Ben’s compulsive hand-washing doesn’t look outlandish now.  When a character suddenly launches into a continuous cough, you don’t hear it as the AML symptom it’s meant to be.

    The film begins with the adolescent Mark and Ben daring to do what the title says, in the hospital corridors.  It’s a safe bet their thirty-something versions will do the same later in proceedings, and so they do.  (The two sequences are accompanied by a jokey sports commentary – from a voice I recognise but annoyingly can’t place, and which is uncredited on IMDb.)  Talking of bets:  gamblers on greyhound racing will likely marvel at the bookies’ generous odds when Ben and Mark go to a meeting – with Sara (Tamzin Merchant), the wine-bar waitress who becomes Ben’s girlfriend, and her work colleague (Emma Stansfield).   In the field of six dogs, the favourite is 3/1 and Ben backs a 25/1 winner.

    The actors are generally good although Andrew Gower’s interpretation of dweebish Ben sometimes feels too emphatic – Victor Buhler’s inexperience in orchestrating a cast may have allowed this to happen.  As the younger Mark, Samuel Bottomley confirms the good impression he made recently in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021).  Although he and Matthew McNulty aren’t physically similar, Bottomley manages to suggest an inner kinship between them that exposes all the more sharply how poorly conceived a character the adult Mark is.  Yet McNulty, as magnetic as he’s natural, is emotionally convincing.  While they’re happening, you believe, in spite of everything (and yourself), in each one of Mark’s interactions.  The one, temporary exception is when he hands over the fateful test results, Ben goes into meltdown and Mark’s lack of sympathy is hard to fathom.  Until, that is, it makes sense.

    27 October 2021

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