Baaria

I really should find out how the Golden Globes organisers choose their nominees. Especially their Foreign-Language Film choices. Then I might know why they thought Baaria was one of the best five non-English-language movies of 2009.

The Oscars organisers have a system. Each non-English-speaking country/territory in the world (even North Korea, perhaps) can offer its national favourite of the year to Hollywood. There are restrictions regarding the sources of production funds, amount of non-national talent employed, theatre screenings, and, one can guess, various etcs that enable all concerned to keep out global cinematic riff-raff.

The manner in which each country chooses its candidate is undoubtedly as Byzantine as Olympic Games committees. Many classics of global cinema have been spurned because their directors or producers were out of favour with the decision-making mafiosi of their nation's movie industry.

Oscar's self-chosen clique of Foreign-Film academicians then decide which five options they think should be offered to the Oscar segment's electors. These include only the academy members who reportedly promise to see all five candidates. Even non-Byzantine conspiracy theorists will detect lots of opportunities for a Hollywood version of race-fixing.

Once upon a time, for a very long time, most of the Academy members able to make the effort of going to see five sub-titled movies must have been retired and old. Most of them would have been migrants, or post-War relatives of migrants, from Europe. They were all sentimentalists.

I have not yet proved my contention by tedious review of the facts, but I suspect that the off-balance demographics of the Foreign-Film electorate led to woefully predictable nominees and victors. "And the winner" would often be a schmaltzy movie with a cute pre-pubescent child or two, heart-warming grand-parental or avuncular figures, left-wingish anti-authoritarian attitudes, generation gaps that melt in the glow of fond memories and cherished dreams, and an entertainment industry connection.

That is possibly how the 1989 tale of a rustic Italian movie-house, Cinema Paradiso, won the Oscar (and the equivalent BAFTA award in the UK). It didn't hurt its chances when its old star died soon after production (or was that another Italian multi-award-winner about a rustic postman and poet? Or another dead actor's final appearance?). More research is needed : how many dying actors soon rested in peace under Foreign-Language tombstones?

Finally, back to Baaria, whose only connection to all the above is its director, Guiseppe Tornatore, who also created Cinema Paradiso. He's Sicilian, and that island's sons have the same right as anyone to make embarrassingly saccharine confections. In Baaria, he clearly wanted to produce an epic tale covering his life span, the history of his once self-contained town (now a suburb of Palermo), three generations, local fascists and communists, and a lot more.

The movie takes well over 2 hours to present a very confusing pageant of different generations of bambini and over-excited crowd scenes. Thousands of extras and massive Sicilian urban settings (recreated on location in Tunisia) are remorsefully presented in idolatrous golden-glowed wide-screen hyper-activity. Cameras run hither and thither, like the fidgety townsfolk. Ennio Morricone's over-loud music is similarly sensually offensive, and everybody on every set constantly screams and shouts in the OTT troppo way excitable Sicilians are supposed to, if that's what their auteur likes.

Were all Italian movies so histrionic and high-pitched? In fairness to a nation of people who, though vociferous, actually communicate, and very delightfully, with their hands and eyes, real research was needed. First of all, via Rossellini, who is another story.