EngineeringMath
This is one of the most moving films I have watched. It depicts the lives of several peasant families living in Italy around (I guess) 1900. The movie includes beautiful tales of human struggle in everyday life. It shows very simply and clearly how we human beings find ourselves puny in a world whose unexpected events we cannot control and how we try to cope with them: we work harder, we use our ingenuity, and when they all seem not to work we ask for divine intervention or resort to crime. The movie had a very sad end, which brought me very close to crying, but it also includes tales of love and sacrifice for your family.Although the movie shows the sort of peasant life that is almost impossible to find today anywhere in the world (I mean in terms of the feudal order dominating the lives of the people in the movie), the dilemmas and challenges that the characters of the movie are faced with are very common to human nature and it is very interesting to see how the characters try to resolve them. The main message of the movie, to me as someone who was born in a poor family in a developing country, is that although the nature of human condition has not changed since the dawn of history, most people live their lives and face this predicament (the human predicament) in a comfort far greater than our ancestors 100 years ago had. And this is something we all should be thankful for.
Armand
Facts, gestures, desires. Marriage, money question, sketch of future, faith. Few drops of Bach and the light as best actor. And respiration of thing aura. A movie about secret rooms of soul. About expectation skin and steps of a boy. About happy like bread. The flour, the yeast, the water,oil, salt, sugar. The dough and crumb of leaven. Each as heart of movie. As sign of a hided benediction. A world. Poor and simple. Without recipes or complicated rules. Slice of a childhood. And story of art to make beauty as veil of feelings. Pieces of a fight against dust of every day. Trip in the essence of images and sadness. Sketches of basic solutions. And day. As arena.
Ana
Yeah, if it did not contain real killing of animals it would be my greatest film of all the times. Thus I give just two points to it. I'd rather give it ten points but I simply cannot.This film is real masterpiece of neorealism. The most exciting film I've ever seen. Minutious in every detail. Shows how tense and frustrating is the life of common man. How actually common people aren't but a livestock of the rich.The metaphor with wooden clogs is hits the point. I will always remember picture of child walking barefoot on muddy road. Some are born with power to castigate. Some are born without chance to change anything.
RanchoTuVu
A mosaic of peasant life in Lombardy at the turn of the twentieth century that slowly moves along for three hours but never comes close to losing interest thanks to the wealth of details and (though amateur) moving performances. In the title lies the heartwrenching conclusion abruptly reached after the meandering and soulful journey that is taken into the lives of a group of peasant families, with the butchering of a goose and later a pig, a marriage, a boatride to Milan, and a dinner amongst the sisters of a convent while the stirrings of political change and repression stay mainly in the background but are there to see. While the focus is on the peasants, the world that the movie creates is more like being there than any other film around.
AD
