Ermanno Olmi
Cento Chiodi

Perhaps the negative judgment suffers from the insurmountable gap between expectations and what was actually seen on the screen, and this is largely the spectator's fault. But at least if the film surprised us in the opposite sense, making us forget how many erroneous ideas filled our heads while anticipating it. Not even that can be credited to it, because it remains a film that fails to emotionally engage with a theme that is too simple in its philosophical difficulty and doesn't even manage to deceive us as every decent film should, to the point where the only scenes that manage to heat us up are those where the lively and blooded people of the Po move, with their boccaccesque and natural vulgarity.

The figure of Raz Degan (of a soporific monotony) is embarrassing, and the subsequent redubbing adds embarrassment to embarrassment: the caricature in certain scenes is not too far off. The only well-sketched figure is the naive and milky "bread girl," and her need for love (which unfortunately, to the detriment of the film's beauty, leans on the shoulder of the handsome Israeli) remains the purest emotion the film can convey. The rest is just a mishmash of characters without art or part, among which the book-loving priest, who perfectly parodies the character he is supposed to portray, stands out negatively.

A separate discussion deserves the message the film wants to convey, certainly noble, but the screenplay does not do its job, leaving a few impactful phrases with the heavy task of signifying something that would have been better emerged from a better-structured script and characters better framed within their environment. Where they would like to be historic, the most significant lines sound already said or completely out of place (the final interrogation!) and the feeling is that the famous "message" was almost artificially attached to the film, instead of allowing the audience to grasp it by following the twists of the story.

From a director who has confessed his love for the documentary form, one would have expected a better description of the fluvial environment, a "mythology" of the Po and its fishermen that instead gives way to a generic environmental protest fueled by the "romantic" idea of a nature that punishes all those who violate it. Perhaps the problem, at its root, is that Olmi wanted to pursue a simple goal through too many paths and got lost.