CINEMATIC RUSTICANA

With the depressing February weather in Britain of late and the unremitting gloom of Starmer's Soviet-style premiership—where it has seemed as if the country’s climate has become uncannily symbiotic with, and sympathetic to, the collective misery of its people—I decided to return to the dry heat and stone-white light of Sicily by way of the Taviani Brothers' Kaos (1984), their cinematic adaptation of four short stories by Luigi Pirandello, complete with a bonus epilogue that brings the entire collection into sublime focus.

If you want to inject the purest, uncut Sicily into your soul, this three-hour movie is the cinematic equivalent of a two-week holiday in that region—a veritable cinematic rusticana, to paraphrase Mascagni's famous opera set in the same terrain. I almost found myself instinctively dabbing beads of sweat from my forehead, only to find there were none. Still, it's a testament to the baked atmosphere of Kaos, which radiates through each frame of this gorgeous work, that I could almost remember the sensation of warm sunshine on my skin for a brief moment—before shivering once again from the biting cold and throwing yet another log on the fire.

Wiser minds than mine have expounded on the Tavianis’ subliminal and subversive commentary throughout Kaos on the limitations of Pirandello’s self-imposed ideas about narrative and prose—limitations that the brothers freely liberate through the art form they have mastered: cinema. An early clue comes in the pre-title scene, where a kind shepherd takes pity on a crow being pelted with eggs by fellow herdsmen. He ties a bell around its neck before releasing it to fly away, at which point it becomes the all-seeing visual device that watches over the stories from then on. This creative flourish is symbolic of what the Tavianis bring to Pirandello’s world—visual poetry.

Music also plays a significant role throughout, providing an operatic quality to key scenes—especially in the second story, Mal di Luna ("Moonsickness"), as well as poignantly in the 20-minute epilogue, Colloquio con la madre ("Conversing with Mother"), where L'ho perduta from Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro plays over images of children leaping gracefully down steep banks of pure white pumice into the turquoise sea. The symbolism of this music is no accident either.

Watching all three hours of Kaos feels like slipping into a fever dream, as if you’ve been a native of Sicily for a century or more. The film reflects the landscapes of Sicily in the most beautiful way—every ancient amphitheater, every stone wall, every tufa-colored house, and every blade of esparto grass is filmed lovingly, as if just as essential to the plot as the actors portraying the characters who inhabit this world. In many ways, it seems obvious that it is the landscape itself that dictates the emotions and actions of the characters, as they are so clearly products of this parched, tinderbox environment. From barbarism to enchantment, from passion to death, Sicily informs every aspect of these stories, and the omnipresent crow reminds us of this at each interval, soaring high and swooping low above the places where our characters reside. It might even be suggested that the crow represents the Taviani brothers—or perhaps Pirandello himself—watching over the jagged coastlines, rugged mountains, and rolling hills like an author, director, or even God. Of course, we, the audience, are the true beneficiaries of this omniscient perspective, observing the dramas and comedies unfold before us as if in a theater of the mind, invited to seek out symbols and decipher their meaning, just as artists do in the construction of these tales. Watching Kaos unfold is not merely a passive experience of viewing, but an act of observing—just as the original author watches for every sign and signal that comes his way to inspire him.

By the time we reach the touching epilogue, we witness first hand how Pirandello's imagination is inspired by the sights and sounds around him, forcing us to retroactively reconsider each of the four stories throughout the film, along with their clues and symbols. The denouement, or resolution, feels more like a meditation on the creative process itself—a Pirandellian conceit in its own right—rather than a standalone story. In fact, the partial story in this epilogue is a fragment of a memory belonging to Pirandello's late mother, one that the author has struggled to put into words. When he visits her ghost in the family home in Agrigento to which he has returned, he tries to imagine it through her eyes, which the Tavianis expertly visualise for us.

And as for the exquisite use of L'ho perduta—originally sung in Figaro by the servant girl Barbarina as she searches for the Countess's missing pin—it can be seen as a metaphor for Pirandello’s own search for the missing final scene. The Tavianis, in adapting the Pirandello mythos into their cinematic world, have been preparing to free this imprisoned scene from the author's mind—just like the crow that soars in the pre-title sequence—creating a moment of wonder that stands alongside the greatest in film history.

"We go back in time as she (Pirandello's mother) describes the day her own mother took her brood of six children in a red-sailed fishing boat for the three-day visit to their father, a political exile in Malta. On the way, the boat stopped at a volcanic island—a mountain of white pumice—and she and her brothers and sisters stripped to their underclothes, climbed up the slopes, and, flapping their arms, floated down the powdery white sand to bathe in the sea. As they slide into the turquoise water, the clouds of pumice drifting down with them merge into the skies and the foaming whitecaps of the Mediterranean. The children are flying through whiteness, and the music carries the sound of a bell, recalling the swooping, soaring crow. The music, the sights, the longings the children have evoked all come together, and for a moment, we're not sure how many of our senses are being affected. And of course, we can see why the Tavianis have their Pirandello figure say that he could never find a way to tell this story: you need to be a moviemaker to fuse sensory impressions as the Tavianis have done here. For sheer transcendence, these moments are peerless; we're with the children, cascading through eternity." – Pauline Kael