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(More customer reviews)Quite simply the best movie produced by Italy in the post-Fellini/Antonioni era. (And never mind *Cinema Paradiso*, the movie of choice for those who drink cappuccinos after lunch.) *The Night of the Shooting Stars*, written and directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is a semi-autobiographical account of World War II shuddering to a close in the Tuscan countryside. The movie begins with the disembodied voice of a young woman, who proceeds to relate her childhood memories of war to her own child. We hear this as the camera stays glued on a static shot of an open window looking out into the dreamy blue evening. A typically fairy-tale-like Italian village is visible. This sets the stage for the impressionistic narrative that follows. Everything seems exaggerated in this movie, which is to be expected when the incidents are viewed primarily (though not exclusively) through the eyes of an impressionable six-year-old girl. The plot is simple: "San Martino (based on the real town of San Miniato between Pisa and Florence) is earmarked for destruction by the Germans. The villagers must decide whether to stay or leave. Rumors abound that the Americans are in the vicinity -- will they reach San Martino first? Or should the villagers hit the dusty roads in the countryside and find the Americans before their town is destroyed? About half stay, and half go: we follow the half that goes. There are dozens of characters who embark on the journey, so not much time can be expended on characterization. But the Tavianis cast actors of such unique physiognomy that we feel we know them at a glance. Quite often, they're presented as heroic archetypes. The camera seems to glow around the young couple freshly married with a child on the way; it closes in on the village priest so that we can see every pore of guilty conscience in his face. Larger-than-life gestures help carry the characterization along. But it's the set-pieces that astonish with their comic and/or dramatic intensity and their hyper-realism. There's a marvelous bit when the girl, watching a small-scale battle that has erupted around her, associates the combatants with the heroes from Homer that her grandfather used to tell tales about. In fact, there are so many marvelous bits that to describe more of them will ruin the movie for you, but I can't end this review without mentioning the brilliant scene involving skirmishes in a wheat field between our villagers and the local contingent of hold-out Fascists. This, more than almost any sequence in cinema, captures the horror, pity, and sadness of war, and what it can do to a community. (The San Martinians and the Fascists mostly know each other, calling out behind the rows of wheat, "I know you -- you're Carlo from Pistoia, Alfredo's cousin!" It's like the Italian version of the American Civil War.) Finally, the movie serves to remind Americans just how much we meant to other peoples on the earth, and how much they loved us. This is bittersweet for us; perhaps educational for today's crop of young Italians who almost uniformly have "PACE" flags hanging out their windows these days. Anyway, *The Night of the Shooting Stars* is a must-own masterwork, without flaw. Highest recommendation.
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