The 66th Venice Film Festival opened with an Italian film after almost 20 years of not having done so. Giuseppe Tornatore's epic tale "Baaria" opened to great public reaction but cool reviews from critics.
The big-budget film presenting a story that spans three generations in his Sicilian hometown got a five minute ovation. The story follows prewar shepherd's son who becomes a soon-disillusioned Communist amid social upheaval and ends up being called a Fascist by a mini-skirt-wearing daughter has been hailed as a masterpiece by Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, one of the producers, and by Sergio Leone scoremeister Ennio Morricone.
While many hoped that this would be another Oscar-winning Tornatore film, just like Cinema Paradiso, critics were less than excited about it.
Variety called the flic ''overblown in every sense'' and said Tornatore ''seems to have forgotten how to develop a scene, let alone a character''.
In Britain, The Times said Baaria lacked ''the magical intimacy that disarmed so many Cinema Paradiso fans''.
Calling it a ''vast, rambling scrapbook of memories,'' the British daily added that ''everything, from organised crime to acute poverty, is dusted with twinkling nostalgia''.
The Independent, calling the picture ''a poor relation to Pardiso,'' said ''the storytelling style is operatic and, at least initially, massively enjoyable. Sadly, the longer the film lasts, the quicker the magic dissipates''.
The Hollywood Reporter said Tornatore ''has always been a sentimental director with a love for over-the-top emotions'' but said he had ''reined in'' the sentimentality ''to give us a moving, autobiographical, nostalgic tribute to his hometown''.
And another British daily, the Guardian, said Tornatore ''may well have outdone himself, rustling up a saga of small-town Sicily that bounces vigorously across the decades from the 1930s to the 1980s''.
''Baaria, much like the man it celebrates, is handsome (and) confident,'' it said, ''but doomed to overreach itself''.
