Il dono

Exceptions prove the rule, but these days the best Italian films seem to be made far from the power centre of Rome. The surprising début Il dono is set in the countryside of Calabria, that is ravaged by a mass exodus. Respectful, occasionally humorous, without drama or many interventions in reality, Frammartino points his camera at those who stayed behind. Il dono is a story without dialogue about an old man waiting for the end with anti-modern apathy in his lonely cottage, halfway up the mountain under an old town. A mentally handicapped girl, who people think is possessed by evil spirits, gives her body, not to supernatural entities but to drivers who give her a lift, back up the mountain. Boys who help the old man burying a dead dog forget a mobile and a dirty picture: the phone rings but the man isn’t really interested for long. It’s an object as pointless as the broken down car by the road or the stranded fishing boat on the coast. A report of a disaster in slow motion, the film has been called. The football bounces down the hillside. There’s no one to stop it. The landscape remains impressive and indifferent.