MOVIE REVIEW : Grand ‘Fiorile’ Enchants Despite Limits

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s “Fiorile” (AMC Fine Arts) is as passionate, lyrical and ravishingly beautiful as any film they have ever made. It has moments of pure enchantment, of exquisitely expressed emotion, and it is often fairly absorbing, although drawn-out. It is also faintly silly, as grand romantic sagas can so easily seem, and it doesn’t travel as well as such Taviani masterpieces as “Padre Padrone” and “The Night of the Shooting Stars.”

As a tale of misbegotten gold that has cursed a family for two centuries, it is the kind of highly emotional material that might have made a great silent film--by Italy’s own Giovanni Pastrone (“Cabiria,” 1913), for example, or even by Cecil B. De Mille. In any event, the Tavianis have brought to the screen a legend handed down over the generations in their native Tuscany, which provides the gorgeous settings for their film.

Luigi Benedetti (Lino Capolicchio), a native Tuscan reared and based in Paris, decides to visit his father, Massimo (Renato Carpentieri), whom he hasn’t seen in more than 10 years, to introduce him to his French wife (Constanze Engelbrecht) and their two small children (Athina Cenci, Giovanni Guidelli, both remarkable). As they travel through the countryside, Luigi starts telling his children the reason why the Benedettis are so often referred to as the “Maledettis.”

With the gracefulness that characterizes the entire film, the Tavianis whisk us back to the late 18th Century, when Napoleon’s soldiers, young men filled with idealistic revolutionary fervor, were invading Tuscany. One of them, Jean (Michael Vartan), handsome and blond, becomes swept away in a rapturous encounter with a pretty peasant girl, Elisabetta Benedetti (Galatea Ranzi), whom he nicknames “Fiorile,” which is the name for the month of June in the Napoleonic calendar.

While the young couple are making love, Elisabetta’s brother Corrado (Claudio Bigagli) steals Jean’s donkey, which has a trunk strapped to its back. Much to his astonishment, Corrado discovers that he has made off with a regimental chest crammed with gold coins. When he lets Jean be executed rather than returning the stolen treasure, both the fortunes and misfortunes of the Benedettis are set in motion, as the Tavianis jump ahead to 1903 and finally to World War II for episodes illustrating the persistent curse that plagues the Benedettis through the generations.

The Tavianis again reveal a profound grasp of human nature in all its sensuality and in its eternal conflict between good and evil, greed and generosity. Yet all their warmth, compassion and eloquence cannot disguise the fact that the curse exerts itself over the centuries in a decidedly schematic manner, an impression heightened by the fact that Bigagli, Ranzi and Vartan reappear to portray members of subsequent generations of Benedettis. (It must be said that at one point it is impossible to accept Carpentieri and Vartan as the same man, in old age and youth, respectively, since they do not resemble each other physically in the least.)

While the Tavianis create a sense of genuine ambiguity in the blurring of legend and reality over a vast period of time, they take the working out of a seemingly arbitrary fate awfully seriously. When the Benedettis--none of whom, unfortunately, is very interesting--speak dramatically of their family curse, you want to tell them to come off it and take responsibility for their own destinies.

If “Fiorile” seems a bit much, like an overly rich Italian meal topped off with spumoni, it certainly has been made, in its leisurely way, with much care and artistry. More than anything it makes you wish you could see a really first-rate film--there was a mediocre TV movie version--on the dire fates meted out to the genuinely fascinating array of owners of the legendary Hope Diamond.

*

‘Fiorile’

Claudio Bigagli: Corrado/Alessandro

Galatea Ranzi: Elisabetta/Elisa

Michael Vartan: Jean/Massimo

Lino Capolicchio: Luigi

A Fine Line Features release. Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Screenplay by Sandro Petraglia, the Tavianis; from a story by the Tavianis. Cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci. Editor Roberto Perpignani. Costumes Lina Nerli Taviani. Music Nicola Piovani. Art director Gianni Sbarra. Set dresser Luca Gobbi. Sound Danilo Moroni. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.

MPAA-rating: PG-13, for violence and nudity. Times guidelines: several scenes of lovemaking, two wartime execution scenes.