A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this flick but since it did win the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and since it was available on Netflix, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, first of all, Netflix really screwed up the aspect ratio for this movie so, unfortunately, I didn’t really have the best viewing conditions. On top of that, it was a 3 hours long very contemplative movie with no plot whatsoever so it turned out to be rather challenging. Anyway, the end result was basically some hyper realistic portrait of the peasants life in Italy at the end of the 19th Century (in fact, all the actors were some peasants coming from the region where it was filmed). Well, I guess it is a matter of taste as the material can be rather difficult to digest since not only you don’t have a plot but you don’t get to know any of the members of the 4 families working at this farm. There was also no political or social judgment on their predicament and, if you might expect their landlord to be turned into some kind of bad guy, well, it wasn’t the case after all. Eventually, you had only two dramatic events that took place, First, there was a diseased cow who miraculously got better and, later on, one of the families got kicked out because the father cut down some tree which seemed rather harsh. Anyway, these were tough times, that’s for sure, and you can understand that most of them were deeply pious since their situation was so bleak that religion was the only thing meaning that someone or something might actually care about their wretched lives. Anyway, to conclude, even if I wasn’t completely sold, it was still a decent watch and it is definitely worth a look, at least, if you like the genre.

7/10