Sicilia! is a film that shines both in its own inherent vision and as a summit in the work of the Straubs, a summit that can be reached without a rope.
If, according Manoel de Oliveira's liberal idea, a film's true nationality is the country in which it's filmed, then a great deal of the Straubs' oeuvre is Italian, even if we hear a lot of German and French in it.
Very few of their Italian films speak directly to the modern world: they are, rather, elegant peplums of theatre where Antiquity is de-petrified and returned to living history.
With Sicilia!, adapted from Conversations in Sicily by Vittorini, it is the Italy of the 20th century, at the end of the 30s, when Mussolini was parodying the Empire of the Caesars, and already exploiting Sicily, an almost African earth, a South that tries for as long as it can to resist the North. And the film is a black-and-white poem of an insulted world.
Thanks to the voices of the actors never has Italian been uttered so amusingly (the text was first performed on stage under the direction of the Straubs), and it is the Italy of today that is physically represented. Incompletely, with intense voids: the lost soul of Italian cinema.
When, as is the case here, it's about unsellable oranges, fish grilled over embers, police suspicions, going back home to mother, secret nightly trysts in the valley that ultimately come to light, tools that no one buys anymore, the loss of manual thinking, what's sung about is the too much or the not enough from which one can build, like life, a film.
(Translation: Andy Rector)
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