Little Italy

EMANUELE CRIALESE'S SICILIAN DRAMA, RESPIRO

The first few reels play like a neo-realist remake: dirty Italian streets, dark-skinned Italian urchins, mangy dogs, Valeria Golino, as the requisite free-spirited sexpot, wandering around town in a flimsy housedress worthy of Anna Magnani. Va-va-Visconti!Respiro's loose story line concerns Golino's family as it struggles with her increasing eccentricity. (Free spirit or ... manic-depressive?) But the young writer-director, Emanuele Crialese—an Italian who studied film at N.Y.U.—seems just as happy to bask in the picturesque glories of Lampedusa, an island off the western coast of Sicily where Respiro was shot. Like Sicily itself, it is both grotty and magnificent. (Hollywood has for some reason largely forsaken the joys of the travelogue.) Golino, best known to American audiences as Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Rain Man, is nicely restrained here, declining to score easy pathos points even when the screenplay requires her to free stray dogs from the pound. (Objectivecorrelative alert!) But the movie really belongs to Francesco Casisa as the elder of Golino's two young sons. Straining to understand and protect his mother, he wears an angry, often impenetrable mask—which makes him a believable adolescent but does tend to undercut the film's emotional impact. No matter. Enjoy the scenery, the people yelling at each other in Italian, and the final shot, a weirdly beautiful image symbolizing community, rebirth, and God knows what else; as a happy ending per se it may not bring tears to your eyes, but as cinematography—kudos to cameraman Fabio Zamarion—it just might. (Rating: ★★★)

B.H.