Italy, 1978
Directed by Ermanno Olmi
With Luigi Ornaghi (Batisti), Omar Brignoli (Minec), Teresa Brescianini (the widow Runk), Battista Trevaini (Il Finard), Lucia Pezzoli (Maddalena)
As the camera follows in a long shot a carriage, the film is first a landscape, an exploration in bleak colors of a corner of the Bergamo province in northern Italy, a vast expanse of fields and woods where stands a huge square building hosting four families of peasants working for a padrone, a wealthy landlord providing this shelter and a few accommodations and leasing his fields and later collecting much of the harvests under a strict, punishing sharecropping contract.
It is in the church of a nearby village, however, that a plot of sorts is set in motion, as the Roman Catholic priest persuades a couple to let their son attend school even if the embarrassed father objects his kid would be more useful at home giving a helping hand around as the mother is expecting another child. But Minec is too smart to have his life wasted and the priest presses the case stubbornly: sheepishly Batisti relents.
That means “L’albero degli zoccoli – The Tree of Wooden Clogs” does not repeat the plot of another Italian film anchored in the rural life and the past that captured one year earlier the public and critical attention, the masterwork of directors Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani “Padre padrone” – the father would not stand as a hurdle and behave as an overpowering and overweening authority youth must cope with and challenge (and of course, this father does not have the agency of a free farmer, quite unfortunately as future events would demonstrate). The main point of the story is actually how deeply committed to helping Minec going to school, succeeding in his studies, feeling happy and protected Batisti is. The film is first and foremost the portrayal of a fatherly love, tenderness, dedication.
It is not only that. Even if Batisti anchors much of the extended, detailed, sprawling narrative, the film turns out to be choral and plural, delving into the hardscrabble lives of all the families who are in the building and crossing their paths all day in the vast square court around which their lodgings are disposed. The theme of dedication to one’s children is examined from a far more somber and poignant angle with the struggles of a widow, Runk, who has just lost her husband and wonders how to look after and feed half a dozen of kids in addition to her father-in-law while possessing so little – an old cow and a little garden – and relying mainly on her exhausting and demanding job of laundress.
To some, life could be a little less harsh and invites to romantic dreams, however. This is the story, told in brief, moving vignettes, of Maddalena, the daughter of a peasant too partial to hard drinking, being courted by a young man distrusted as a marauder but so sincere and gentle he cannot be ignored. Even if the father does not attend the ceremony, a wedding does conclude the subplot, followed by an extraordinary journey to Milan. The film delicately tracks the romantic sentiments slowly taking hold of the shy young girl and the whole gamut of deeply felt emotions her journey from being still someone’s child to adopting, under pressure but with delight, a child, from toiling around her parents’ home to taking care of her own place, from a corner of the world to one of its centers, and back, for the best moreover.
To others, life could be even more a mayhem, defined by a very human but truly repugnant ability to be mean, callous, cruel. Il Finard is cast from the start as a tough man eager to spy on his fellow tenants and to pick up a fight with his drunkard and rebel of a son. Even if it is in a caustic, even comic, though of the dark sort of humor, edge, the film never fails to observe what he is up to, how he can drift deeper and deeper into wickedness, how bad and irredeemable he is – and the son proves to be even worse, ratting on folks to please the landowner. Il Finard’s greed, jealousy, hypocrisy, brutality, stand in stark contrast with the gentle and generous behaviors and feelings of the other farmers – but then, evil always finds a way to thrive.
The feature does not simply transition mechanically from one subplot to another. They rather organically appear from the wider stream of life, shaped by various habits, either personal or communal, and the seasons coming one after the other, with the various agricultural tasks they demand. Walking down a path after attending the mass or chatting and laughing around the fire during a wake, in a room shared by all in wintertime to stay warm and make the evening pleasanter or attending are important fixtures of these lives and matter as any plot-driven incident to understand the characters and share their experience. Indeed, the film, with its long takes and very long runtime, nearly three hours, is keen to convey the specific pace and patterns of this rural life as it was in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
The endeavor was bold but it is never boring, the characters, their humble lives, their community rituals, their painstaking and eager tilling of the lands slowly commanding the audience’s full attention, the images being both as thoughtful and precise records and as a mesmerizing, wonderfully sensitive, display of the course of time and the rush of emotions. Even the language becomes easy to get used to even though it is a specific Lombardian dialect barely intelligible to many Italians and which has probably never be used, and purposefully so and to great effect, in a work of art, certainly not on the silver screen. It is important to note that all the actors were real peasants from the Bergamo province, in Italy and had no acting experience at all. The authenticity of the rural world they reenact owes a lot to this artistic choice as well as the somber cinematography or the mise en scène so focused on the beauty of the peasants’ gestures and their world.
Still, like the Taviani brothers, director Ermanno Olmi tells a tragic story emphasizing inequity and brutality, never idealizing but always observing that shocking and age-old gap between the haves and the have-nots. Miracles can happen. The widow Runk believes so strongly in her prayers and whatever a bottle of water may actually contain, but also is so desperate that the poverty trap would wreck her children’s life further, that a sick cow can really recover overnight and keep feeding the family. And the love story offered by the marauder is the real thing, providing Maddalena with fresh hope and agency.
Society remains harsh, however, even when modernizing and booming. The journey to Milan proves it, with an arson spotted from the barge carrying the newlyweds and other folks deftly standing as a harbinger. Reaching the convent where Maddalena’s aunt lives is difficult because the streets are a battleground between mounted policemen and running demonstrators: socialism battles the power that be to make sure industrialization’s profits are fairly shared but it seems a lost battle (it may be as pointless to demonstrate in the big city as it is to make a speech in the village close to the farmers, as an earlier sequence showed). But the worst case scenario happens to the kinder character of the lot, the first one to appear, the one who has embodied family values so well and movingly.
To cut down a small tree to make a clog replacing the one Minec broke while at school, probably because the shoe has been so worn off by the long stroll from home to school made twice a day, day in and day out, could have passed unnoticed and anyway does not look a big sin compared to the constant poverty of the farmers and what is at stake – allowing an intelligent child to have a good education and better occupational and individual opportunities. The rule of the land and the wickedness of others decide otherwise, keeping the film to have any sort of happy ending. It is on the most bitter and heartbreaking note that this beautiful and considerate, elegant and sober, film ends. Olmi has presented the world a distant era and locus which he made remarkably relatable and admirable, bringing his audience right into limited lives caught in a thankless society but still enjoying what seasons and habits provide, still believing in love and trusting God, and naturally, unreservedly, commanding respect and compassion, if only because those values of being respectful and being compassionate so conspicuously and efficiently animated the director and inspired a fine screenplay first and then pictures whose realism and sobriety have been skillfully crafted.