134: Three Brothers (a.k.a. Tre Fratelli)

            
I’m at an impasse with Francesca Rosi’s Three Brothers (1981).  It’s another film that I just can’t decide if I liked.  Usually I give such films a few days to marinate, but this time I’ve decided to start my review just after finishing my viewing.  I know there were things I enjoyed about the film, but they were slow in coming.  In fact, the first half of the movie felt flat to me, without any interest generated in the characters I was presented. 

As one might presume from the title the film concerns the lives of three male siblings.  When their mother dies at their childhood home the three men return to the village for her funeral.  Each brings with him a set of problems that preoccupies his conscience as he travels.  The oldest, Raffaele (Philippe Noiret), has made good as a judge in Rome.  He’s assigned to a commission that prosecutes communist terrorists, and has begun to fear for his life.  He leaves his wife and adult son in the city as threats of assassination begin to mount.  Such acts were commonplace in the Italy of the time and Raffaele knows many colleagues who have become victims of the same crimes they try.

The second brother, Nicola (Michele Placido), is unmarried but has a large family of sorts.  He is a supervising social worker at an urban center for delinquent youth.  His convictions are strong and he believes in what he does, but the problems of the street – drugs, violence, filth – continue to hold high influence over the boys he is responsible for.  Before he leaves for the funeral he is confronted by yet another official accusing his residents of petty crimes.  

The youngest brother is Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno); twenty years Raffaele’s junior.  The two men have little in common.  Rocco supports the workers movement that has polarized the nation, even defending the uses of force that often lead to the crimes his older brother prosecutes.  He brings with him his young daughter who is just old enough to enjoy the rural landscape.  Rocco and her mother are separated, but only Raffaele seems to know this.  When someone asks where is wife is he says that her sister is in the hospital. 

That each man brings with him a specific concern – political, social, and personal respectively – is appropriate, as Rosi intended for them to represent the factions of the fractured Italian society.  Still, none of them seem to be well-developed.  We see their struggles and in some cases their fears, but until the second half of the film they are each so one-dimensional.  This is the risk filmmakers run in drawing on allegorical characters.  The film picks up in emotional depth as each man slowly comes to realize his distance from his past and his childhood home.  This realization is juxtaposed nicely with scenes of Rocco’s daughter discovering elements of her pastoral heritage.

I think what makes the early segments of the film so off-putting is that all three characters of the title share nary a scene, let alone a shot, until about the midway point.  This may have been intended by Rosi, as the film can be viewed as a coming together of family and past relationships, but that point is slow in coming.  But the film is not devoid of poignant moments.  They come in the form of flashbacks and a series of flash forwards that may or may not be the true future.  Nicola remembers as he returns the day of the village’s liberation by an American tank corps, and in the film’s best scene the men’s father recalls his early married life to the now deceased mother.  It rains on their wedding day (a sign of good luck) and on their honeymoon she briefly loses her ring as she plays in the sand at a beach.  Thinking quickly he borrows a colander from a nearby house to strain through the grains.

These moments are moving and quiet in their intimacy despite the outward joy they convey.  They are contrasted by a set of dreams, one of each brother, as they sleep in their childhood bedroom.  Raffaele tosses and turns, awaking in screams as he sees his own assassination.  Rocco reunites with his wife.  They quarrel briefly, but find themselves in each others arms.  Nicola’s dream plays out almost as a musical staged by Gene Kelly.  The children of his parish unite to clean the filthy streets, sweeping the dirt, the syringes, the dirty money, and the garbage in to a pile to be burned.

Whether any of these futures is legitimate is debatable.  In any case they hardly matter.  The film ends as they leave to bury their mother.  Nothing seems to have been solved.  The problems of Rosi’s Italy were not so simple.  The elderly father stays behind with his granddaughter.  In a private moment he seems to find peace with his wife’s death.  His actions seem to imply a wisdom that life goes on despite all problems.  I liked the film’s ending and the small payoff it provides, but it’s a bit too lengthy of a lead up to this moment.

Grade: 2 Hats Off

Language: Italian

Runtime: 113 Minutes