Landscape portrait – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Italian drama Children of the Sleeping Giant by Lorenzo Pallotta successfully pretends to be non-fiction, but then it is devoured by the darkness of either a fairy tale or a cruel parable. Nevertheless, the author confidently calls his work a documentary, and this is one of the most interesting films of the current Doker Documentary Film Festival.
The Italian region of Abruzzo, mountains, forests, hopeless gray winter – the time from Christmas to Easter. In the village, which seems to consist not of houses, but of walls and ruins, a dozen families live, mostly old people, among them is the local patriarch, who has grown into his closet and utters common truths. Of the young ones, two brothers, the eldest, Simone, is about to turn 18, the youngest, Mattia, is still a child. There is no work, there is nothing for young people to do, “except to become a thief.” In his free time, Simone races through the mud on a cargo scooter, imagining that it is a racing car. Hanging out with his brother in the woods, spying on the local hermit, the madman Filippo, talking to animals. Starting this year, Simone will be responsible for the gloomy city holidays: on New Year’s Eve he will have to build an effigy that will be burned at night so that the coming year will be good. By Easter, he will have to find a sacrificial lamb, slaughter him, and then ascend with a cross to the local Golgotha.
In Italian, the film is called “Sacro moderno”, that is, “Modern Sanctity”. The international name is “Children of the Sleeping Giant” with the clarification: “The Sleeping Giant is an idiom that denotes a country that is not currently strong and influential, but has great potential to become one.” These two names complement and shout out to each other: the Italian one explains what modern holy fools, shepherds, and hermits are doing, and tells how the new generation picks up the cross that falls from the hands of the old. The international name tenderly turns away: all this is just children’s games, let the kids frolic until the giant wakes up.
Critics have compared the film’s slow pace to the realism of the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta and the magic of Alice Rohrwacker’s Lazarus, but there’s also the innocence of Michelangelo Frammartino’s Four Times and the total subordination to the landscape, like some Malik or Reygadas. Starting as a social statement (the village is dying, I would like to keep the youth here, to interest), “Children of the Sleeping Giant” go into a story about everyday life, then wander through the territory of magical realism and get lost in the windbreak of a religious parable about holiness, observance of the commandments and the power of paganism.
Thirty-year-old director Lorenzo Pallotta, who was born in a similarly small town, says the main goal of his debut feature film was to show how the characters distance themselves in various ways from the hierarchical system that has developed in the village, from the “quiet violence” that pervades everywhere. Simone exists in full view of the whole village, feels his responsibility for it, becomes the guardian of traditions. Filippo refuses to deal with people: people are busy with stupid rituals, they don’t listen, they only evaluate each other. True, the sheep do not listen to him either: he reads them the Gospel of Matthew, and when he gets to the line “So, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of its own”, the sheep leave one by one, as if not believing the words of the shepherd .
This whole story about tomorrow is turned into the past: the village of Intermesol has existed, according to some sources, since the time of the Roman Empire. Pallotta films village holidays as processions of the blind in the fog, and in the opening credits he gives a chorale to the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini about a poor and sinful world that trades in guilt and contempt: “I am more guilty than all, I thirst for sins and deprivation.”
In Pallotta’s short film Ossa (2018), the withdrawn, insecure teenager also fled from the world – he tried to disappear into the landscape. The last villagers in Children of the Sleeping Giant have a completely different problem: they try to take root in the landscape, to stay, to become a milestone, a cross, to make themselves the whole world. The social and religious statement turns into a portrait of a place that has reason and requires sacrifice. Pallotta, he says, filmed “a deliberately magical universe, the boundary between dark fairy tale and coming-of-age drama”.
All the actors are residents of that very dying village, all the rituals really must be observed. Trees, walls, processions, sheep, people – they all play themselves, fundamentally not noticing that the camera is aimed at them. In the finale, not even ashes remain from the declared documentary, as well as from sociality, as well as from the drama of growing up. What remains? The pathos of a parable, the unconvincing follies of ancient tragedy, the ruthlessness of real scary tales. A landscape that does not need a person.
Cinema “Karo 11 October”, August 20, 20.20
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