Francesco Rosi was already
considered among his contemporaries to be one of the finest Italian filmmakers
in cinema history. Having won the
coveted Palme d’Or in 1972 for The Mattei
Affair as well as two Golden Lion Awards for Lifetime Achievement and his beloved
1963 classic Hands Over the City,
Rosi mixed Italian neorealism with a distinctively cinematic narrative evoking
human warmth, pathos, tragedy and transcendence. His bullfighting thriller The Moment of Truth was as nerve
wracking and visually stunning as anything in Henri Georges-Clouzot’s oeuvre
and his Sicilian gangster epic Salvatore
Guiliano cemented the filmmaker as a formidable director ready to dive
headfirst into the dusty and rocky Roman and Sicilian trenches to get as close
to his subject as technically possible.
It was only a matter of time before Rosi would garner his first and only
Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1981 for his
poignant, somber and reflectively funereal Three
Brothers.
After the death of an
elderly matriarch in southern Italy, her three sons who have taken on vastly
different walks of life including judge Raffaele (Philippe Noiret),
correctional counselor Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) and factory worker Nicola
(Michele Placido) are summoned by their father Donato (Charles Vanel of The Wages of Fear) to return for her
funeral procession. Cross-cutting
between the trio who are mutually unhappy and face their own respective
hardships while being buoyed by a sentimental thread involving their father and
Nicola’s daughter, the film is an often somber, tragicomic tale mixing dream
and memory, fantasy and reality to create a headspace cloaking these people as
they come to grips with their mother’s passing.
Aided by gifted, heartfelt performances from all involved, utilizing the
barren countryside Roman locations to their fullest effect and anchored down by
a melancholy score by Pino Daniele and Piero Piccioni, the experience of
watching Rosi’s film is akin to walking the long and winding roads of grief,
closure and absolution. 
Often deeply moving and
spiritually satisfying, Three Brothers is
a paean to nostalgia, yearning for what was once held sacred now withering with
age and time. Some of the film’s most
affecting moments involve Vanel’s Donato whose craggy face exudes sadness and
yearning all the while trying to maintain composure in the face of an innocent
granddaughter unable to fully grasp the situation. Elements of the finale are indeed
politicized, drawing a link to Rosi’s prior work and some of the fantasy
sequences including a band of school kids brooming away heroin needles echo the
surrealism of Federico Fellini. And yet
the overall impression one comes away with is no matter what trajectories our
lives take, it all comes back to our upbringing and the pain of losing a loved
one. Like Akira Kurosawa, fans of Rosi
will indeed notice a slower pace than his more youthful work from the 1960s and
the feeling and tone is that of an older man looking back on his life with
humility and wisdom. While not the
easiest film to recommend to most viewers or newcomers to Rosi, I myself was
moved and reminded me of every instance where I’ve ever lost a sibling, friend
or loved one to the sands of time.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki