A Grisly Bedtime Story

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS

Directed and Written by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

The belief is as old as the Tuscan hills.

For the villagers of San Martino, the feast of San Lorenzo is the night when wishes come true. This night, Aug. 10, 1944, there is much to wish for and little hope of satisfaction. The German army is in retreat, dragging its dead across northern Italy. Gangs of Blackshirts, faithful to their Duce, are sweeping the countryside with kamikaze ferocity. The American G.I.s, tough-guy redeemers, may arrive tomorrow or never. So a score of the villagers leave San Martino to escape the carnage--and find what? What these ordinary people find in themselves surprises them: the fierce, fulfilling strength of solidarity, a species of collective heroism.

Since their first feature film in 1962, the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have explored the themes and feelings of the Italian left. But their work is no forced march of socialist stereotypes. Like the characters in the Tavianis' Allonsanfan and Padre Padrone, the people of San Martino never surrender their luxuriant individuality. One young woman with a large birthmark on her cheek and a mischievous smile in her eyes tells a virginal girlfriend: "You don't know what it's like to be ugly and still feel beautiful." An angel-faced teen-age boy, whose ardor for Fascism amounts almost to sexual hysteria, is shot by some of the villagers he tried to kill; seeing this, his Fascist father flies into a fatal jitterbug of despair, burrowing his head into the hard earth. Cecilia, at six the youngest of the fleeing villagers, finds the ordeal a delicious, dangerous game, like hopscotching through a minefield.

This essentially true tale of a village's resistance is told by the present-day Cecilia to her own child on another night of shooting stars. It may seem the grisliest of bedtime stories, an unholy mixture of Disney and The Disasters of War. But it allows this event to be seen through the wide clear eyes of a child, and to exist both in the recent historical past and in the storybook realm of once-upon-a-time.

Like the beneficent San Lorenzo, the Tavianis grant each villager's wish by making no formal distinctions between reality and fable. Every one of Cinematographer Franco di Giacomo's images has the same cartoon clarity whether it documents the townspeople's journey or dramatizes their sweetest, saddest fantasies. A girl bumps into some soldiers and sees them as G.I.s, come to take her to America; in fact they are Germans about to slaughter her, and her vision is a dream flash the moment before she dies. Early in the film, the villagers hear a faint but rousing rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and imagine it is the American Army; in fact it is only a phonograph record, but the villagers believe, and one young man, scanning the hills, wipes tears from his eyes as he exclaims, "I see them!"

It is the achievement of the Tavianis and their cast of professional and nonprofessional actors that the receptive viewer comes to see and share these dreams, finding gentle humor and martial horror in each character, each scene and shot. By the end of this majestic entertainment one feels like the children in it: that one has not been told this story but dreamed it, and awakened refreshed and exhilarated.

--By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.