Il pianeta azzurro

Franco Piavoli's environmental visual poem is the cinematic equivalent of New Age music, presenting a gentle, meditative collage of ambient sights and sounds meant to be absorbed more than watched. It's an idyllic vision of peace and plenty synchronized to the cycles of nature, with no scripted dialogue and, except for a brief moment, no orchestrated music to interrupt the flow of imagery. The setting is an Italian farm where a full year of seasons pass over the course of a single day, but there's a chronology to Piavoli's editing which suggests an even grander scale of evolution, from the genesis of springtime to the winter of extinction: water bugs to amphibians to Homo Sapiens. The effect is not unlike watching ice melt or grass grow: a slow, calming experience that can nevertheless be the ultimate in tedium to viewers not prepared for what to expect.