Review: Terraferma (2011)

Cast: Filippo Pucillo, Donatella Finocchiaro, Beppe Fiorello
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Country: Italy | France
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: Terraferma is now open in limited release

“It wasn’t like this in my day,” is a phrase known well to any child who’s ever held counsel with a grandparent, even just a parent. Few things change less from generation to generation than the sense that the present is an inferior incarnation of the past, victim to the distractions and drawbacks of modern culture, that the “old days”, for all their own problems, were inherently better. More so than any other, cinema is an art form that allows us to quash that false sentiment: it is history recreated, the past preserved to be re-presented just as it happened upon a strip of celluloid. Or rather, now, on a hard drive. It wasn’t like that in my day.

The reality, of course, and that to which Crialese prominently points in his invocation of Visconti, is that this life has always been a struggle.

It’s not by coincidence that Terraferma, the latest film from Italian director Emanuel Crialese, calls to mind Visconti’s La Terra Trema. He engages directly and determinedly with his nation’s past by way of Visconti’s image thereof; his own movie, in fact, can be seen almost as a direct response to the earlier one, not deterred by some six decades in the difference. Both films concern the fate of families whose lives depend on the fishing industry of their near-identically sized Sicilian towns; both, throughout, lament that industry’s impending death; both—crucially—by way of integral grandfather characters, recall the past as the site of greater fortunes. The reality, of course, and that to which Crialese prominently points in his invocation of Visconti, is that this life has always been a struggle.

His exposition of the lack of change the years have yielded allows Crialese to broaden the scope of his study, to look beyond the perpetual problems of these people to find the wider issues at play in the world around. He finds them at sea, in the wreckages of makeshift rafts ferrying immigrants to Italian shores, in the washed-up corpses of those who failed to make it. It’s here that his film invites easy comparisons to Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, though their ease doesn’t undermine their efficiency: in their respective atmospheres of neorealism and quasi-fantasy, Terraferma and Le Havre paint an overarching portrait of the moral imperative of this issue that transcends political policy. How, ask Kaurismäki and Crialese both, is it preferable to have children die in our waters than live on our land?

It’s here that his film invites easy comparisons to Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, though their ease doesn’t undermine their efficiency: in their respective atmospheres of neorealism and quasi-fantasy, Terraferma and Le Havre paint an overarching portrait of the moral imperative of this issue that transcends political policy.

Beyond his parallels to Visconti and Kaurismäki, Crialese does manage an infusion of his own stylistic particularities. There’s a quiet comedy to his film, predicated mostly on the irony that arrives alongside the boatloads of tourists whose presence provides a new form of income to the decimated fishing community. The natives’ bending-over-backwards to please these visitors at the same time they deny the refugees constitutes an accommodation of the wealthy at the expense of the poor that’s as slyly amusing as it is sadly true to life. What’s sadder still, perhaps, is how much this influx signals the start of Terraferma’s problems, bringing with it a host of tangential subplots that do more harm than help in bolstering Crialese’s thematic investigations, his narrative diversions all-but marginalising the wider socio-political aims of the piece.

There’s an extraordinary scene not far from the end of the film where a beach strewn with sunbathing tourists is interrupted by the arrival of a tide of immigrants, live and dead. Set to a harrowing score, the close-up shots alternate crying black faces with shocked white ones, the contrast between the two and their circumstances providing one of Crialese’s more powerful invocations of the staggering inhumanity of the social system that could lead to such a scene. It’s in moments like these that Terraferma triumphs, building on the image—and its aspects that linger—of Visconti’s past to expose the greater issues of the present. If only they weren’t so few, and so fleeting.

[notification type=”star”]72/100 ~ GOOD. In moments Terraferma triumphs, building on the image—and its aspects that linger—of Visconti’s past to expose the greater issues of the present.[/notification]