Folk Artistry

By RICHARD CORLISS

Luigi Pirandello died 50 years ago this December, but his influence is still palpable in Italian cinema. Recently Marcello Mastroianni has starred in two adaptations, of the novel The Late Mattia Pascal and the play Henry IV. Both movies offer aspects of the basic Pirandello theme, in which the universe is a carrousel whirling off its moral axis, and man's ego is a mask that conceals a gaping void. In their entrancing new film, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have revived a less familiar Pirandello: the compulsive storyteller, spinning tales about his native Sicily, its stern landscape and elemental passions. Kaos dramatizes four of the short fictions Pirandello collected in his 15-volume A Story for Every Day in the Year. Three (The Other Son, The Jar and Requiem) are just fine, anecdotes about longing and power in which the inexplicable nuzzles up against the predictable. A fourth (Moon Sickness) and an epilogue, which lures the author into his own imaginary world, are small miracles of narrative. They raise the folkloric to folk artistry.

Twenty days after her marriage to a gentle farmer named Bat`a (Claudio Bigagli), pretty Sidora (Enrica Maria Modugno) is startled to hear the baying of an animal in torment. It is Bat`a, who, as he explains, suffers fearful convulsions each night of the full moon. A scholar of his own illness, Bat`a instructs Sidora to lock herself away from him, but as the moon waxes he breaks through a window and attacks her. Come the next full moon, Sidora is prepared for the worst and the best. Her handsome cousin Saro (Massimo Bonetti) will protect her and, if God hears her prayers, fulfill the desperate passion they have for each other. That night, a cloud passes across the moon, sparing Bat`a from his convulsions and offering him a glimpse of his wife undressing for her lover. A new, more powerful sickness fells Bat`a, and as he finally sinks into exhaustion, Sidora cradles him in her pity and guilt. So they sit, their lives mapped before them, each with a mortal affliction as lunatic as the ache of ecstasy.

Here, as in Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars, the Tavianis' style is surrealism made simple. Their fantastic fables are filtered through a peasant ruggedness; their images are as clear as a Giotto fresco; the actors find precision in the volcanic gestures of Italian opera. In one scene, Bat`a sits alone in the town square to confess the origin of his ailment, and a flashback shows the infant Bat`a in a field at night, his huge eyes transfixed by the harlot moon. No minimalist torpor for the Tavianis--every frame is over the top and on the money.

In the epilogue, Pirandello (Omero Antonutti) visits his old village two years after his mother's death. An aged carriage driver seems vaguely familiar; then Luigi remembers--"You're Saro!"--and the driver smiles back, suddenly as young as he was in Moon Sickness, and as vibrant as only a creature of the imagination can be. Once at home Luigi conjures up a vision of his mother, who recalls an incident from her adolescence, when she and her siblings stopped at an isolated pumice-stone island near Malta. They climbed to the top of a white dune, then bounded gaily down toward an impossibly blue Mediterranean, the pumice ash rising like a breeze to embrace them in the seductive promise of youth. Our carrousel may be spinning toward disaster, the Tavianis say, but to the music of art and memory we can ride sweetly forever. --By Richard Corliss