Salvatore Mereu
Ballo a tre passi

Forget everything you've heard, because Sardinia is not an island.

Sardinia is a vortex, universal. A vortex of silence and at the same time of noises.

A photograph ignored on the geographical map, deliberately or not, by everyone.

And not only by the distant Italian peninsula, but by all of Europe, by the world.

Sometimes, by its own inhabitants.

For more than twenty years, I've always considered it a litmus test. An assay to the flame of the remaining quantity (and quality) of humanity. A kind of mirror, trying to observe with its ancient and sometimes atrophied iris a remaining world doomed to implode unconsciously. I believe Salvatore Mereu, director of "Ballo a tre passi" (2003, Eyescreen), must have thought the same thing, as with this now dated film he divided its essence into four episodes of high symbolic meaning.

Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Giving hearing, smell, sight, and touch to four characters representing the varied path of life of every human being (childhood, youth, maturity, and old age), Mereu forces the viewer to savor a dish that sooner or later one must bite into willingly or unwillingly: existence. This all happens in this case through the naivety of a boy, willing to do anything to escape from a majestic prison of mountains and golden countryside, where the sea becomes the only and sole instrument of freedom. Of eternal projection towards infinity. Of hope for a future yet to be written.

Of escape.

The same Sea, which in the second episode of this feature film will see the first, inevitable contradictions emerge of a land often made a slave to itself, as much as to the irreversible advance of a world foreign to it: that of umbrellas, lounge bars, consumption entertainment, and economic and sexual carefreeness. It is the case of Michele, a young shepherd and emblem of innate resistance against a different, sometimes epileptic, incomprehensible, and extremely distant world from the intimate seduction that nature grants its children along with equally uninterpretable violence. In a moment of life like that in which youth suddenly becomes adulthood, uncoordinated and grotesque, everything takes a painful new turn, ending with the conclusion of a cycle that seemed to be interminable.

None of that.

Immediately after, autumn arrives: with it, wisdom and maturation will transform reason into blind, deaf, and mute faith, in the face of the sensual call of the happy past. In this case, seen through the eyes of a young nun returning to her community, the path one takes imposes doubts, uncertainties, reflections, and regrets. Things we wanted to do but didn’t. Things we wanted to say but didn’t. Roads we closed off but should have traveled to ensure greater happiness. All this then paints a dark picture, making us slaves to the conforming state of grace that such an existential fulfillment offers as the only alternative.

The painful acceptance.

Finally, the winter of life: old age.

Time of aseptic and dilated silences within a panorama unfamiliar to our previous existence, where everything is different from what we were formed in. Where everything is foreign and alienating, and where not only matter or flesh consumes but also that hope lost in previous decades. But above all, where the only possibility of salvation remains the painful and despicable recollection of what is no more, through simulation and illusion of a belonging now lost, although loved with passion and infinitely pursued, in vain.

May I kindly suggest to everyone, without any resentment, to glance at that trace of land shaped like a sandal in the middle of the Mediterranean every now and then. Not to remember past summers or those we want to plan. And not even to evoke crystalline seas and lush and wild vegetation.

Only for one reason. To remind us that what we wear is our life.

And that day by day, it passes, without taking us back.

“Sorte currede, e non cuaddu”.

(It’s fate that runs, not the horses).