Affirmations

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THREE BROTHERS

Directed by Francesco Rosi

Screenplay by Tonino Guerra and Francesco Rosi

One of them (Philippe Noiret) is a judge, a man who not only upholds the traditional liberal and rational virtues but actually believes in them. This despite the fact that in Italy just now, a man pre siding over a terrorist's case (which the judge is about to do) can get himself killed just for doing his job. The second (Michele Placido) is a factory worker, a militant trade unionist whose apparently congenital bad temper is not improved by the fact that his marriage has just been sundered. The third (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) is a teacher in a reformatory, a secular saint whose politics consists mainly of setting a good, if humble and anonymous, example for a world that is heedless of his like.

These are the three brothers of Francesco Rosi's fine, gently stated but ultimately very moving film. Summoned home for the funeral of their mother, they must confront one another, the past from which they were once so eager to escape and, above all, the example of their father (played by the great French octogenarian, Charles Vanel). The old man exemplifies not just a different "life-style" but an entirely different, and doubtless doomed, way of being. Slowed, but not bowed, by age and grief, he is a farmer whose rhythms have been set by the wheel of the sun, the turn of the earth, a man who patiently accepts death as part of life's cycle and pays no heed whatever to the transitory cries of the far-off city streets.

In his house his sons dream bad dreams, argue politics and fail to escape their preoccupations. Aside from ritual condolences they have no exchanges with the patriarch. They are, at worst, unconscious rebels against his values, but they are entirely lost to the appeal of those values.

One of them, the worker, has brought his daughter (Marta Zoffoli), a child of about eight, with him. She will share a bedroom with the old man, hear his explanation of why a countryman needs no alarm clock, play sensuously in the grain stored in the barn and, while her father and uncles are at the funeral, find a symbolic egg and present it to her grandfather. She alone among the visitors will cry for the dead woman and elicit answering tears from her grandfather. Thus do the innocence of childhood and the simplifying wisdom of age find common ground, and strike a sweet, clear note of hope, quite unsentimental as Rosi understates it.

It is a tone Rosi struck before, in the notable Christ Stopped at Eboli two years ago, which also contrasted the timeless virtues of peasant life with the murderous meaninglessness of modern intellectual and ideological bustle. He was not then, and he is not now, soft-headed in his appreciation of the simple life. Nor is he ever less than humane and fair-minded in presenting the torments of the bedeviled worldly. Indeed, he strikes one as being among the world's most scrupulous directors, a man whose instinct for the play of light and the unobtrusively correct camera set-up is as much an emblem of his integrity as his choice of themes is.

All Rosi's actors are superb, but a special word must be said for Vanel. You can read everything Rosi wants to say about the values of patient intelligence, unassuming craft in the seams of his ancient face. One could study him forever, and do worse than study Three Brothers more than once.

--By Richard Schickel

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