La Terra Trema (“The Earth Trembles”)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Antonio Petrangeli, Giovanni Verga, and Luchino Visconti
1948/Italy
Universalia Film
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
[box] Title Card: [in Italian] In Sicily, Italian is not the language of the poor.[/box]
Despite the gorgeous visuals, enjoying this film requires a higher tolerance for tragedy than I have.
The setting is Aci Tressa, a dirt poor Sicilian village, where fishermen spend endless hours at sea in all weathers only to earn a pittance from the local merchants for their catch. Most of the young people in town are too poor to start their own families. The younger fisherman are chaffing at the bit but it is the elders that negotiate the price of fish. Finally, the young men rebel and insist that they take over the job. The only result is a kind of riot as the merchants resist.
‘Ntoni Valastro, against the advice of his grandfather, decides to buy his own boat and mortgages the family house to do so. All the brothers work in the new business. At first, all goes extremely well. It looks like a huge anchovy harvest might earn the family enough to pay off the debt. ‘Ntoni works like a mad man to reach his dream. Then one stormy day, ignoring all warnings, he decides to risk the weather to go out to fish.
The brothers emerge with little more than their lives. The boat is wrecked and all the equipment is lost. The fishing boat owners and merchants refuse to hire any of the brothers in retaliation for their rebellion. Things go from bad to worse as the family loses everything and slowly disintegrates.
The film is firmly in the neo-realist tradition. It was filmed on location, in the Sicilian dialect, and without dubbing. All the parts are played by amateur actors. As usual with these things, the performances are of wildly different levels of believability. On the other hand, they do lend the film a documentary-like quality.
The film was partially financed by the Communist Party and starts out looking like it will be a tale of proletarian struggle against a capitalist system of exploitation. I could have lived with that. However, the message I came away with was that any such struggle was completely hopeless. Furthermore, almost every character is unpleasant. The merchants are, of course, the worst, but the fishermen and their families are no prizes either. It was really hard to sit through two hours and forty minutes of bad news.
None of this takes away from the exquisite compositions achieved by Visconti in La Terra Trema. It is truly gorgeous.
Montage of clips from the film set to music by Phillip Wilcher – print quality on DVD was much better
