Life is Life <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/>

Life is Life

Here's another serving from the Italian Film Festival, this one set mostly in the fictional town of Bellesammama in Southern Sardinia, the beautiful Spiaggia di Tuerredda standing in for the beach paradise. The recognisable story goes that a rich company wants to buy up the land on the beach to build a resort, promising to create jobs and bring untold wealth to the struggling area.

Everyone is confident things will be done and dusted in no time until the real estate company runs up against an immovable object, old farmer Efisio (Giuseppe Loi). Offered ever increasing sums of Lira, then as time goes on, Euros, he rejects all. This is his home, he doesn't need anything else.

The townsfolk cajole Efisio and chivvy his daughter Francesca (Virginia Raffaele), hoping they'll see reason. The head of the Milanese real estate firm, Giacomo (Diego Abatantuono), sends a foreman, Mariano (Aldo Baglio) to sort things out, and even enlists the local mayor and police. No dice.

Although Life is Life (or La Vita va Cosi) is based on the true case of an old Sardinian shepherd, it plays like a sunny, Italian Local Hero, right down to the rich company president making a visit to the idyll - but does Giacomo handle it in the same way Burt Lancaster did?

Riccardo Milani's film asks some curly questions about sacrifice, class disparity, Italy's north/south divide, loyalty, roots and community, and seems to have a bit of craic with the Sardinian dialect too. It could have been trimmed a touch and some of the antics of Mariano were way too broad - he very nearly derailed the whole film. There's also a parallel universe version of this film when Efisio is quietly dealt with by the mafia. That certainly would have been a very different movie but perhaps more realistic.

The film's message was also a bit ambiguous - it was difficult to tell how the villagers ultimately felt about Efisio's stance. Francesca's final utterance of 'finding a way' seemed to indicate a failure, or at the very least, a lack of growth or progress. So maybe a slice of realism after all.

Life is Life is part of the St. Ali Italian Film Festival, showing in Perth at Luna and Palace cinemas (and many fine cinemas around Australia).

See also:

Bill Forsyth's aforementioned (and excellent) Local Hero (1983) is a touchstone. On a different note, some of Lewis Gilbert's 007 effort, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) was filmed in Sardinia.

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