Critics reviews

In some moments, Pieruccioni appears to shepherd this living local history with the same care he bestows on his flocks and his fields. This is perhaps the most lasting takeaway of the only intermittently transcendent Creation—growth industry or not, the legacy of the land is, like the arable land itself, something that needs tending to.

The film's slightly pompous title is fulfilled in prismatic ways: the stories we hear, the impending renewal of the land under its new owner (who will allow Pacifico to stay), the tours Pacifico gives of the area, even an excerpt from a low-budget film about partisans that's shot there. Cutaways to nature's splendor abound: Mists enfold the mountain; Mr. Casanova mesmerizingly holds one cross-fade from these clouds.

Sometimes I think Italians don't deserve all the beauty that surrounds them, the future landlord says. However uncharitable the remark may be, Rapisarda Casanova's film shows just how much natural splendor dominates the region, here caught at the height of estival glory.

Casanova is right on the contemporary curve when it comes to his approach to documentary filmmaking, staging sequences with non-actors to arrive at his version of the truth of the region he's shooting in. The results are suspiciously lulling in a rural idyll way, unexpectedly/organically funny and admirably cohesive.

Through a number of extended sequences, The Creation of Meaning locates dazzling moments when hysterical absurdity backgrounds the quotidian (think: talk radio) and asks how the collision of past, present, and future can shape political formations that remain invested in the work of everyday life.

Searching, earthy, and droll, Casanova has made a tour of time, space, and place, an occasionally overgrown net of history, genre, and feeling whose roundabout aim it is to catch nothing short of sense and significance.

Though he eventually lands on something of a narrative focus with the quotidian toil of elderly shepherd Pacifico, writer-director Simone Rapisarda Casanova never fully departs from this Rubik's Cube-like construction, wherein the viewer must actively grasp around for connective tissue while also considering how that thought process reflects the route to historical epiphany required of its main subject.

While the Aleph that Rapisarda Casanova discovers in the northern edge of Tuscany may not always boast the "almost unbearable brightness" of the one in that humble Buenos Aires cellar, it can often have the same dizzying effect. Under the rustic relics of the past and the calamities of the present, Rapisarda Casanova uncovers a few traces of the infinite, as well as some fresh iterations of a decidedly cosmic sort of joke.

High altitude affords rewardingly wide perspectives in The Creation of Meaning (La creazione di significato), an uneven but promising sophomore outing for Montreal-based Italian director Simone Rapisarda Casanova.