(1995; L'Uomo della Stelle, Italian) "Sometimes I look at the stars and reason," reflects D'Azzo the shepherd (Vincent Navarra), regarding the stars as his sheep: "Does the world really exist? I don't think the world exists, it's just pretend." In post-war Sicily, arriving in a truck in Realzisa, claiming to be a talent scout for Universalia Studios in Rome, Dr Joe Morelli (Sergio Castellitto) offers screen tests for 1500 lira in his search for new faces for the cinema. An actor can make a hundred million lira a year, he announces.

All over town people practice lines from Gone with the Wind before getting in front of Dr Morelli's camera, giving him left and right profiles, face center, and then recite their lines or ad lib. A woman who cannot afford to pay for her daughter's screen test - her husband's in jail - pays in kind.

Stopping Joe's truck on his way to the next town, a policeman, Brigadiere Mastropaolo (Franco Scaldati), accepts a bribe of being captured on celluloid reciting Dante's poetry. Joe talks his way out of being robbed by three thieves, the brothers Badalamenti, letting them have three screen tests for the price of just two.

In the next town a scornful woman says she's nearly 30 and unmarried because she's been falsely accused of having fornicated with an American soldier; protesting her innocence to the jeers of the townspeople, she expresses her desire to leave this hell hole. Uncle Leonardo, said to 112 years old and a survivor from the days of Garibaldi, sits before the camera courtesy of his neighbors. An unreconstructed fascist quotes Mussolini. A professor, who has remained mute from his horrific experiences during the Spanish Civil War, comes to Dr Morelli at night for a session where he movingly utters a brief account of facing the machine guns with the Fifth Regiment: "And Franco can go to hell."

On his way to Scaridizzi, Joe gives a physician a lift to attend to a critically ill patient (who dies); during the drive the doctor (Joe's Virgil) speaks of the various deceptions visited upon the poor people, illusions offered them by the state, the church, and now Morelli's selling them false dreams.

After a homosexual hairdresser briefly recites his difficulties living within a machismo society, an orphan girl, born in the convent of a virgin, "fifteen or eighteen" years old (she's unsure because she's illiterate and can only count to ten), asks to be photographed. Beata (Tiziana Lodato), who washes floors and sleeps in the convent, explains that she got the money from Don Gino the tax man by showing him her nakedness (but she never lets anyone touch her). Impressed with her beautifully photogenic features, Joe declines to take her money.

During the funeral of a local Mafia don, who in life was never photographed, Morelli's asked to film only the corpse as a tribute of respect; additionally when invited to play cards with the mafiosi, he walks away with a pile of cash. Finding Beata as a stowaway in the back compartment of his vehicle, he returns her (unsullied) to Scaridizzi where the nuns refuse her readmittance to the convent.

After his truck breaks down, the Princess of Montejuso (Jane Alexander) tows his vehicle into a ruined, otherwise abandoned village where he's introduced to her husband the Prince (he tells of his dream of wanting to build a bridge across the strait of Messina to the mainland); the couple then dupe the beguiler.

Re-imagining Dante's Divine Comedy in a secularized era, director/screenwriter Giuseppe Tornatore's film begins in a comic register with a mountebank, gradually shifting - following the mood of Ennio Morricone's score - to pathos as strangers entrust to Morelli their deep-felt secrets and passions, including Beata's committing herself body and soul to him, before he suffers retribution, concluding (in Beata's mind Morelli has died) on a note of redemption.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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