Kritiken

The nightmare of war is sublimated, without making it banal, into a fairy tale about the absolute and desperate necessity to stay human even in the darkest times.

Set in the Tuscan countryside during the summer of 1944, with the American forces advancing and the Germans in retreat, "Night of the Shooting Stars" is an unpredictable, often comic blend of sentimental naturalism and skillful hyperbole.

The modestly sized church constitutes the largest structure of the film and is meant to offer a place of refuge for the displaced Italians. When it's eventually blown to bits, the result is devastating, but logical. In times of modern wartime, the sanctuary can instantaneously become the burial ground.

The humorous glides directly into heartache, as in a fantastical, vaudevillian scene when, closely tending to each other's wounded, one party asks the other for water, until their fatal partisanship is recalled and the groups take aim. Here and there the acting runs a bit mannered, but La Notte de San Lorenzo carries on, a vividly impossible tale that remembers and invents and accepts bewilderment.

[The Night of the Shooting Stars remains the Taviani brothers'] premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s. The dominant entry in MOMA's complete Taviani retro, Shooting Starshas a propulsive, anti-Odyssean plot unique to Taviani movies. Fantastic and episodic, this saga of Italian villagers roaming the Nazi-upended countryside searching for the liberating armies commingles doom and magic and absurdism with spectacular confidence.

The Tavianis may not set out to persuade the audience to care for their characters by drawing psychological profiles or proffering "revealing" traits... but, by the end of this unexpectedly moving film, the people in it are engraved as deeply on the memory, and their adventures have become as elusively evocative as any of the people in any of the yarns spun by any of those travellers on their way to Canterbury five hundred years ago.

For all of the American cinema's infatuation with "childlike innocence" in the late 70s, this 1981 film is the only one of its era I know that captures a child's point of view both convincingly and movingly. Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have brought a sense of premorality both to the composition of the images and the shape of the narrative: the cosmic and the trivial have equal importance in the balanced frames, and no one episode is stressed at the dramatic expense of another.

The intensely communal memories of families and neighbors sharing crises and tragedies provides the heightened emotional tone, but it's the fertile imaginations of the filmmakers that keep this movie moving, in breathless and fluid fashion, from one florid epiphany to the next.