Peasant Soup

By F.R.

THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Directed and Written by Ermanno Olmi

On the evidence of this movie, the 1978 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, it seems safe to say that Italian Director Ermanno Olmi is no fan of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. Like 1900, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a lengthy (three hours), luxuriously photographed film about Italian peasants, but after that all similarities end. 1900 was a didactic epic that attempted to merge the florid drama of opera with the tenets of Marxism; Clogs is pointedly a tranquil, nonpolemical attempt to describe the peasants' daily existence in the objective manner of documentary cinema. Given their respective goals, Olmi's movie is the more successful of the two-- yet at what price success? The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a triumph of the bland.

The movie is set on a Lombard farm stead at the end of the last century, and it consists of anecdotes about four families who serve the same omniscient landlord. There are, quite intentionally, no theatrics. A couple gradually fall in love and get married. An old man raises a tomato crop. A father illicitly cuts down one of the landlord's trees to make wooden clogs for his son to wear to school. Meanwhile, the seasons change, the sun rises and sets-- all in the ripest of MGM colors.

There is nothing wrong with Olmi's decision to avoid the contrivances of narrative or ideology, as long as he then goes on to reveal the truth about his characters. This he has not done. Despite its length, Clogs is entirely composed of very brief scenes. Though the flow of vignettes captures the outlines and rituals of the people's lives, the individual peasants are permitted only predictable reactions to cliched situations. Nor does Olmi allow his characters the chance to talk, however inarticulately or apolitically, about the matters of life, death and love that perpetually confront them. Presumably he has no idea what they would say. Since he has cast inexpressive non-actors in the roles, the faces on-screen do not fill in the thoughts and emotions that are absent in the script.

In the end, we learn only that every peasant is a saint who suffers in stoic silence. Bertolucci's observations are no less sentimental, but at least he took some artistic risks in the process. While Olmi seems to feel that the sheer homeliness of his technique amounts to blunt honesty, his aesthetic is every bit as disingenuous as that of a professional waif portraitist in Montmartre. All he has done is serve his picturesque peasants on a pretty platter so that rich people, from a safe distance, can get their fill.

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