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Reviews
Contronatura (2005)
Intriguingly offbeat romantic allegory
"Contronatura" could be described a bit too simply as a romance between a rural woodsman and a suburban pharmacist's wife playing out the struggle between civilization and nature. True enough as far as it goes, but there are plot twists to make it more interesting than such a facile description suggests, and the director's background in making nature documentaries gives him a marvelously skilled hand in using the natural backgrounds and weather of coastal Tuscany.
This story could have so easily fallen into cliché, but the cast, brilliantly picked, fill out their characters and grow credibly through the story. The setting also becomes alive as a character, not just the backdrop, but forests and rivers alive with fauna that catalyze the human drama.
This would be a terrific date movie for people who enjoy thinking as much as they like romance. Heck, it's a terrific movie all around!
Il silenzio dell'allodola (2005)
An important story muddled with gratuitous bigotry
The movie purports to tell the story of Bobby Sands, a North Irish Catholic who was tortured and abused by British forces, and died in a hunger strike. That much is historical fact and stated at the beginning of the film, so the plot and ending have no surprises. It's an important story that deserves better treatment than this movie provides, despite the best intentions of the director. The story is laden with heavy-handed religious imagery comparing Bobby Sands to John the Baptist, and the prison warden to Herod. The Warden with a hook nose and long, stringy hair comes off as a very insulting Jewish stereotype. There is also a scene where he is sexually involved with one of the guards who offers to get for him another guard, making the villain a homophobic stereotype as well as an anti-Semitic caricature.
One positive aspect of the film is that the brutal violence in the prison is only shown "around the edges," not graphically exploited as it would likely be in an American production, but made just clear enough to know that the prisoners suffered horribly. It's a nice bit of subtlety in an otherwise bigoted and cack-handed effort of religious allegory.