Four Pirandello stories and an original epilogue form a portrait of Sicily, linked by the flight of a raven - bird of ill omen - over the landscape with a tinkling bell around its neck. The film-making is perfect in its calm effortlessness and quiet simplicity, always finding the essence of a situation. Often, the camera makes small, revealing horizontal pans, then pans back and reveals again, as the first subject has changed.
Every episode is infused with a sympathy for whatever simple inescapable sorrow everyone is afflicted with - peasants, grandees, men in uniform - which often seems to seep into them from the land. Even the happiest character in the film - a lawyer - is in bed recovering from an operation. Each story has layers of meaning and a melancholy twist - even the comedic episode finishes on a note of tragedy.
The first story opens as the country is being drained of its men - they're off the America - leaving the parched landscape to the sullen women. An interesting moral dilemma is raised: how if a woman is raped by her husband's murderer and has a child which grows up to look exactly like its father? The bitter irreconcilability stands for the rift between the old land and the new.
In the second story, possibly the finest, a newly married woman discovers that her husband goes berserk, wolf-man like, every full moon. She uses the occasion as an excuse to bring her former lover to her room while her husband rages outside. There's a step forward in the moral arc of the film - reconciliation is possible when you come to understand someone else's suffering.
The Jar is remarkable, not so much for the diabolic overtones of the hunchback who gets trapped inside the giant olive jar he has just mended, as for the surprising bitterness of the landlord whose success is made mockery of by thoughts of death.
Death itself is the subject of the fourth story in which an old man sits over his grave and literally waits for it to come in order to lay claim to the land he will be buried in. Since the land, on which generations become established, becomes in effect composed of the dead, there is a subtle moral question of a man's rights here, suffused with ghostly mysticism - an issue we have lost sight of in the modern world.
The Epilogue is almost too sublime to describe. It may be the most perfect, most meaningful 20 minutes ever put on film. In it, Pirandello himself, weary now of life, travels to his childhood home in Sicily, drawn by the spirit of his mother. She tells him again the story of the journey into exile by boat when she was a girl, only this time filling in some crucial forgotten detail. The span of time held in our mind here is breathtaking - backwards from an old woman long dead who is reflecting on the memory of an intense childhood experience; forwards to her son, now old himself and aware of his own impending death, trying to capture some meaning in it all that is the spark of life, knowing that this spark itself will soon go out. The climax to his mother's story - cascading down a white cliff of powdery white pumice into an azure sea is an image so beautiful, so mixed of elation and despair, that no more words in the film are possible, nor necessary.
