Three Brothers

Near the end of Francesco Rosi's elegiac and troubled Three Brothers (1981), a little girl finds an egg that a hen has laid in the courtyard of a big farmhouse in southern Italy.  She excitedly presents the egg to her grandfather.  There is a brief close-up of the egg in her hand, a luminous alabaster orb.  The score for the film sobs and oozes sentiment.  The scene is strangely moving even though overtly symbolic.  Rosi has made something important and emotionally powerful out of the ordinary.

At the film's opening, we see an old man walking along a stony path in an arid landscape.  A fat pinkish-looking rabbit is grooming itself along the path.  A middle-aged woman appears and says that she tried to catch the rabbit to cook it for the old man but it was "afraid of death" and escaped.  The old man stoops and picks up the rabbit by its long ears.  The woman walks down the path, putting her foot on the biggest boulder protruding from the trail -- this is the kind of movie in which you notice details of this kind.  It seems odd that  the woman choses to set her foot on the big stone and not step over it.  The old man blinks and, then, the woman is gone.  A moment later, he sees her behind him, standing by a tree with old bench built around its trunk, the ancient rock ramparts of a village behind her.  She vanishes again.  The old man puts the rabbit down and it ambles away.  Later, we see the old man sending three telegrams to each of his three sons to tell them that their mother has died.  

Three Sons is classically simple, built with the rugged austerity of the huge farmhouse where much of the action takes place, a windowless fortress with barns under the living quarters, exterior stone steps that look older than Pompeii, and a large vaulted granary above the chamber in which the old woman's corpse lies on a bed, two tall tapers at her black-shod feet, with local women keening in a kind of rhythmic chant around her body. The film's landscapes are indelible and the viewer is quickly oriented to both the plot and the terrain where the action occurs.  The old man's eldest son is a Judge in Rome about to accept a case involving terrorists who have killed several other judicial officers.  He is afraid and plans to send his family to the mountains so that they will not be threatened with assassination.  The old man's second son is a counselor at a  home for delinquent boys.  He is a kind man who worries about the poor and starving.  When he arrives in town, his first stop is the parish priest who remembers him with warmth.  He has two visions in the course of the film that are central to its meanings.  The third son is 20 years younger than the Judge.  He is married to a woman from Turin, a town to which he migrated from the impoverishes south (Apulia, I believe) to find work. This man works at a car factory and he is labor organizer, not averse to knocking heads when there is conflict with management.  (He says:  "I'm no terrorist.  I rough them up.  We don't kill anyone.")  This man, Nicola, is estranged from his wife -- she has been unfaithful, something that a "we Southerners" as he says can not tolerate.  (He has apparently been unfaithful himself although that is a different matter.).  A bit of a hot-head, Nicola pursues an old girlfriend in his native village.  The woman is anxious to have sex with him but not "on his bed" -- referring to her husband who is away working in Germany and who comes home twice a year:  for Christmas and during the month of August. The sexual encounter with the woman is thwarted and Nicola seems to go back to Turin where he fights with his wife, but, then, sleeps with her.  The status of this sequences is unclear -- either it is a daydream or an actual dream or, perhaps, a flash-forward.  Nicola has driven to his native village with his small daughter, Marta.  There's a peculiar sequence in which Marta has to go to the bathroom and Nicola simply pulls over on the side of the road, on a huge shapely viaduct, probably the worst place for this sort of thing you can imagine.  (I don't know why he doesn't just proceed to the next rest-stop.  Italian highways have many very nice rest stops with cafes, gas stations, and even formal restaurants every few miles.)  The little girl doesn't want to urinate with cars roaring by and so Nicola opens both doors on the side of the vehicle to provide a shield for the child.  This is an odd detail and I don't exactly know what Rosi intends by this scene -- perhaps, he is showing us Nicola's impetuous and impractical nature. Some critics have suggested that the little girl reincarnates her dead grandmother:  we see her sleeping in bed with her grandpa before the funeral and, in one startling scene, she explores the cavernous old farmhouse, discovering an old buggy in which her grandmother and grandfather traveled to the sea for their honeymoon.  During this trip, the bride lost her wedding ring in the volcanic sand on the beach.  The wedding ring is later found when the grandfather, here shown as a handsome young man, pours the sand through a sieve.  In the granary at the farmhouse, actually in an attic above the living quarters, Marta strips off her outer clothing and bathes, as it were, in the amber grain. (This rhymes with the flashback of the grandmother as a bride lolling about in the sand on the beach.)  Later the little girl finds an odd trapdoor through which she can peer down on the corpse of her grandmother in the room with the chanting women.  The symbolic center of the film involves Rocco's visions.  Rocco is the gentle and enigmatic brother who counsels the kids at the delinquency center.  In the film's first shot, we see what appears to be a battlefield strewn with filth where several large rats are feasting -- this is Rocco's dream and it seems to represent Italy in 1980.  Near the end of the movie, Rocco has a vision, also initially shot from a very low angle like his first dream:  many brooms and feet appear and all the garbage is joyfully swept away -- we see heaps of guns and bombs and syringes all swept into a heap by the whisks of brooms carried by the boys at the Reform School.  The scene of this vision shifts from a stylized backdrop of New York (greenbacks fall like snow) then Moscow (the Kremlin with winged commissars like angels circling the onion domes in an actual blizzard), and, at last, the bay of Naples with Vesuvius smoking in the background.  While Rocco is having this utopian dream, his brother the Judge imagines that the terrorists have assassinated him -- he is lying covered in blood in the back of Roman bus from which the other passengers flee screaming down the street.  

The film is full of strange, generous details.  The old man tells the little girl that people his age wake when the cock crows twice (that is around 4 in the morning); children her age wake when the donkey brays -- that is about seven.  He has no need of an alarm clock.  The little girl says that if she stays with him, perhaps, she will learn what he knows -- an image for the reconciliation of the perpetually divided north and south of Italy, a married couple that don't much like one another.  Nicola tells Marta that old people in small villages in the South are never alone because they have "their animals" -- we see that this is true:  a black dog always ambles alongside the old man.  In an amazing scene, Rocco rises, hearing doves cooing in the courtyard.  It's a little before dawn and he goes into the kitchen to make some coffee -- some of the interiors of the farmhouses look prehistoric, antediluvian.  Rocco goes to the window to see that the Judge and his younger brother have both ventured out into the court yard where there are hens and doves fluttering about.  He sees that both man are weeping and his shoulders also shake with emotion -- all of this captured in one impeccably framed shot.  In a flashback, we see an American tank crawling up a hill outside town.  The peasants have come out of their warrens -- the walls are all covered with Fascist graffiti.  The tank is blasting jazz -- "I can't give you anything but love" and the soldiers emerge, speaking Italian and calling the farmers their paesanos. The Judge visits his old wet-nurse and marvels at how small the fig-tree seems in her courtyard -- it's you that have become big, the elderly lady says.  

Everything is admirable about this film, but it leaves me slightly cold.  The movie sets up the conflicts between North and South, the old and the new, the dirty big cities full of dehumanized people and the small towns, terrorism and the gospel, but can't resolve them except, perhaps, in the metaphor of the egg held by the small child.  This isn't a criticism, necessarily, because some dualities are, in  fact, irreconcilable.  But the picture is extremely didactic and schematic as well. The small details that I have mentioned (and there are many others as well) cut against the grain of the speechifying but the brothers seem in some respects to be mere ciphers, symbols for certain aspects of Italian society.  The hellish poverty in southern Italy is invisible or, perhaps, merely very, very photogenic -- I can't fault Rosi for not emphasizing this; he addressed this theme in his earlier film, Christ stopped at Eboli.  But the village does seem a bit idealized.  Some of the scenes are just naked debate in which characters state propositions that the filmmaker wants you to absorb -- the redoubtable Tonino Guerro wrote the argumentative script with Rosi.  There is no doubt that Rosi was one of the world's great directors, too little known in the United States.  His majestic and unsettling Salvatore Giuliano is probably the greatest film ever made about the Mafia, but even in that masterpiece the picture settles in to an instructive (and rather tutorial) mode during its last third.  I've seen several of his pictures and they are all superb, but I find them emotionally remote.  This is probably a defect in my own sensibility.