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At last, the meadows have returned. On the mountains, on the trenches, on the remnants of barbed wire, on the low graves of the abandoned and forgotten dead up there.
More than a war film, it's a documentary about war. About what the waiting was like, the cold, the silence, the death. There are few screams, few shots, few explosions, little blood. War creeps like men in the snow, expands into the souls of soldiers, rains from the sky like the ghostly flakes of a storm, and bursts into a deadly fire only to fall silent again. That war was the night of the West; it was the site where hopes, dreams, illusions, and the lives of our ancient world were demolished.
The story unfolds precisely at night, over a few hours, in the silvery darkness of the snow-covered mountain illuminated by the Moon. The cold, majestic images of the snow-capped peaks, the poetry of the larches that get lost in the luminous darkness, the purity of all this contrasts with the miserable scar caused by man, with the unstable trench that is home, shelter, but at the same time prison and curse, and is in any case inexorably doomed to destruction.
We are on the Asiago plateau, perhaps in the winter of 1917, although the allusion to the very rare leaves and the dramatic bewilderment and alienation of the soldiers seem to place the events before Caporetto and the subsequent reorganization of the army. There are however clear references that give a ruthless and dramatic idea of the war on the Italian front, among endless winters, battles and barracks in inaccessible places, the total horror of the struggle with the mines.
What really matters is that we are facing the First World War. It could be any trench on any front, any faces in one of the countless, endless nights of vigil and terror.
The fear of an enemy that shows itself only with a few screams in the darkness and with the steel of its artillery serves as the backdrop to a gallery of gray, minimal, brutalized, and hopeless characters. There is no real plot, just an intense, deaf, and slow descent into the soul of war itself, where the beards and hallucinated eyes make all faces look the same. Scattered frames of four years of hell, memories of suffering and death.
The fleeting figure of the major from the division command only serves to remind us what absurd orders and discipline were, to offer us a vague and incomplete general picture. It's not, what Olmi shows us, the war of orders, directives, and maneuvers. It's the sleepless and infamous night of the soldiers, it's a story that has neither a beginning nor an end. Because the men who write their letters looking us straight in the face don't want to tell us any story; they are them, speaking to us from the abyss of time, making us glimpse for a moment all their miseries, but they can't tell us how it all started and not even, above all, how it will end.
Even after a century, truly understanding what the First World War was is complicated, almost frustrating. It's difficult to imagine how it was possible to harness the human and material resources of a Europe at the peak of its splendor to throw them into a blazing furnace of mud, shrapnels, mangled flesh, gas. And even more difficult is imagining what all this must have been for a poor ignorant farmer, sent from who knows where to get killed like a stray dog. With its flat and dry tone and distressingly slow rhythms, "Greenery Will Bloom Again" tries to show us, to give us a shocking look at that ever more forgotten conflict which in reality was the true, great trauma from which all the miseries of the West were born.
Remain, of those desperate faces, voices that barely whisper, stone stelae always deaf and mute in loneliness and silence. A cold memory that is not enough to redeem the life and death of men victims twice. Of war and, at least in Italy, of a proud and patriotic memory that did not gather in mourning and remorse, but celebrated with doped emphasis the "heroic" deeds of the infantrymen mowed down by bombs and gas. They perhaps already knew: the meadows will return, and all this suffering will be forgotten under the sun, life, under the weight of the terrible years to follow.
It is petty and useless to ask whether it was right or wrong, it is misleading to ask what purpose it served to go slaughtering each other amidst the frost, among the mountains. Austrians and Italians will surely have different, equally painful ideas on this subject, as do the Germans and French, Belgians and Russians. It can be discussed, but I don't think these are the questions Ermanno Olmi wants to raise.
Everyone sees it as they wish. What I heard at the end of the film, while staring at the black screen, was the voice of the soldier. Without name and without uniform, he simply told me one thing: these are the days of our deaths. If you can, remember them.
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