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Reviews
The Music of Regret (2006)
Surprisingly Effective Puppets (plus Meryl Streep)
Currently available on the Criterion Channel in a pristine print, this 44-minute film is divided into three short Acts, performed by puppets. In Act I, the unexpected sources of regret among selfish individual puppet characters carry considerable emotional weight, with no humans on camera to dwarf the evident suffering of the little figurines. In Act II, Meryl Streep -- in her familiar human form -- tries to choose a lover from among several candidate puppets, all of whom seem diminished by her larger physical form and committed singing. Act III, in which prop-like torsos are supported by actual ballet dancers' legs, while apparently auditioning for theatrical roles, slightly disappoints, because no member of this desperate little Chorus Line of hopefuls has a face.
The Sicilian (1987)
Go Back to 1962
One of the underlying problems with Michael Cimino's film is that it makes the remarkable Sicilian countryside do too much of the narrative work. If you were to watch the film with the sound turned off -- saving you from the stilted dialogue and the gushy score -- you might think much better of the whole enterprise, so powerful is the photography of those rugged mountains and steep canyons. But everything is so visually splendid that it undermines any sense that the poor are actually suffering and starving out there. A travelogue does not always make for good storytelling. And, of course, the pan-and-scan version, the only one currently available on DVD, chops out most of the landscape, limiting the impact of the movie's visual achievement.
Another problem for Cimino's film is that there's actually a much better version of the same story from an earlier director. Few people seem to be aware of the earlier treatment. In 1962, the great Italian director Francesco Rosi released his superb version under the title "Salvatore Giuliano." It's in black and white, but gloriously so. The massacre of the peasants in Rosi's version is one of the most heartbreaking and dramatically memorable sequences in the history of Italian film. And throughout, the dark ambiguity of the main character remains consistently compelling, within a far more complex storytelling mode than Cimino's surprisingly straightforward Hollywood-inflected retelling. The Rosi film deserves to be much better known.