Review
RESPIRO
Starring Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato and Francesco Casisa
Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese
Opens Friday, October 10
Uptown Screen
Capturing the beauty and brutality of Mediterranean island life, Respiro is as natural as "breathing," which is, in fact, the literal translation of the title. But the film by Italian-born, American-educated writer-director Emanuele Crialese would be more accurately described as naturalistic, in the 19th century connotation of the word.
The natural environment plays a crucial role in Respiro, which tells the story of one family in a fishing village on the island of Lampedusa, to the southwest of Sicily. There, life and prosperity are at one with the rhythms of the sea, but for Grazia (Valeria Golino), the turquoise surf also represents a place of quiet contemplation and retreat. Most of Grazia’s life is spent in servitude to her fisherman husband (Vincenzo Amato) and their three children. This being an extremely patriarchal family and community, Grazia’s two young sons have more authority than she does in most situations, but her spirit demands to be freed from its familial and societal bonds.
In this respect, Respiro bears a greater resemblance to legendary American director John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence than it does to the Italian neo-realist films it has most often been compared to, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Wide Blue Road. Like Gena Rowlands’s character Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, Grazia’s domestic burden is almost too much for her to bear. She begins to express her discontent through "anti-social" behaviour – nude sunbathing, for example, or the release of wild dogs that have been penned up outside of town – and eventually the other villagers perceive her "mental illness" to be a liability to their community.
It’s true that Grazia has seizures, but to what extent these are precipitated by stress is hard to say. It’s clear that her husband, Pietro, loves her, albeit in a macho and paternalistic kind of way. He’s also frustrated by her unpredictability, but nothing is overstated in Respiro, which is partly why it draws comparisons to those neo-realist dramas of yore. In its portrayal of a small community’s intolerance toward that which it does not understand, it achieves a kind of poetic truth that is all too rare in cinema today.
Yet, when Grazia disappears from the village one day, her departure is a shock to everyone. It is at this point that the film’s narrative style takes a turn toward magic realism, and Crialese does an excellent job of portraying the superstitions that so many southern Italians hold dear. Again, it is to the water that the community returns, to express its grief and to reconcile itself with a future in which life will be considerably different. Crialese and cinematographer Fabio Zamarion paint in the colours of the Mediterranean, capturing the starkness of the land in harsh browns and whites, and the solace of the sea in convivial blues and greens.
The film’s conclusion is intentionally ambiguous, but refreshingly so, and Respiro leaves us pondering the peculiarities of its milieu as well as the interconnectedness of family, society and the natural environment that we all occasionally take for granted. |
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