Some people far more emotionally resilient than me have decided that now is the time to lean into the coronavirus situation with their cultural consumption. Gilmore Girls? Please, Contagion. 30 Rock? How about Safe (available on Criterion), the Todd Haynes film where an affluent Southern California housewife's (Julianne Moore) escalating symptoms are linked — at least she thinks — to some kind of environmental contaminant, driving her into the clutches of a cult-like wellness community in the desert where she is more and more isolated until (spoiler alert!) she ends up living in a pod and only walks around outside in what is basically a moonsuit.
It's also, some argue, about the HIV/AIDS epidemic; widely considered to be one of the greatest films of the 1990s; and something you'd have to be absolutely insane to watch now.
But that brings me to the other film that came to mind but that I wouldn't want to watch at this moment.
I have a regrettable tendency to relate nearly everything to movies I've seen. This goes far beyond "COVID-19...Contagion!" It's more like, "I've told nearly everyone I knows who lives anywhere between Downtown Brooklyn and Gowanus, or even just on the F-G below Bergen, that that scene in Goodfellas where Karen is picking up the dresses from Jimmy and thinks she's about to get murdered happens right under the Smith-9th Street stop and wow hasn't the neighborhood changed?"
And right now we're not just thinking of infectious disease outbreaks, quarantines, enforced isolation, but also particular places that are either especially hard hit or are just prophecies of what's to come everywhere else the coronavirus runs rampant. And I'm thinking of Lombardy.
Lombardy is, of course, the epicenter of the Italian coronavirus outbreak and generally considered the most prosperous region of the country and its economic engine. This has lead to some weird intra-Italian "regionalism" in the discourse, where those in the know assure readers that, actually, Lombardy has good hospitals, a functioning government, and isn't ruled by the Mafia like those shifty denizens of mezzogiorno which, to bring things full circle, are the cousins of the vast majority of at least the East Coast Italian-American community.
But Lombardy was not always the prosperous commercial, financial, and fashion center that is today — at least for not everyone. And whenever Lombardy is in the news, I can't help but think about The Tree of Wooden Clogs.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) follows a group of Lombard tenant farmers who share a single farmhouse in the late 19th century. Except follows is the wrong word, it more lives among the farmers, who are tied to their land with the exception of a honeymooning couple who go to Milan and a boy who walks miles to the parish school (his long journey gives the movie its title, explaining any more would constitute a spoiler).
The 3+ hour runtime establishes it as almost a parody of morally serious European art film — little happens in terms of plot, the main characters are desperately poor, a pig is actually slaughtered on film, and the dialogue isn't even in Italian, it's in Lombard. I saw it at Film Forum maybe five years ago, in an uncrowded-enough screening room to be socially distanced, but in an audience of those who, for age reasons, should be cocooned right now.
The film was made well after the tide of Italian neo-realism peaked and is far less emotional than, say, Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine. It's also in color and, while it contains communist rabble-rousery (which the peasants almost entirely ignore), it's not itself a work of communist rabble-rousery like, say, 1900 or The Conformist. And it makes sense — in orthodox marxist terms, the farmhouse residents are hardly a blip on the historical materialist radar, let alone a proper revolutionary subject.
It's, instead, about life. A type of life that would soon enough be largely extinct in Western Europe but has defined human existence for thousands of years — people tied to land, at the mercy of the seasons as much as the landlord, with little political or social connection outside of the confines of their very local community.
It's not a movie about an exceptional peasant overcoming his circumstances to rise up and liberate his people, it's about how life was lived on the smallest of historical canvasses, in a world where any contemporary division between family and the individual, work and leisure, was obviated by the necessities of agricultural labor, local production, and desperate poverty.
But one thing it isn't is a movie about social isolation. It may be a movie about economic, political, or cultural isolation, but one thing the peasants of Bergamo have is, for better or worse, each other. They work and live side by side with themselves and their animals, and while this may be a classic disease vector, they have no worries about loneliness. Maybe it is a good movie to watch right now — at least they all get outside.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is available to rent or buy digitally on several services.
No comments:
Post a Comment