Baarìa **

Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Cast: Francesco Scianna, Margareth Madè, Ángela Molina
Monica Bellucci, Raoul Bova, Enrico Lo Verso, Gaetano Aronica

Epic in every sense of the word, Giuseppe Tornatore's "Baarìa"is a lovesong to the Sicilian town of Bagheria; Tornatore's own "Amarcord" if you like.
Like Fellini's masterpiece, this movie is composed of vignettes where we see life filtered through the views of the townspeople, particularly Peppino Torrenuova (Scianna) who becomes our guide through the decade spawning yarn.
We follow Peppino from his humble beginnings as the son of a shepherd (Aronica), his courting of the beautiful Mannina (Madè), up to his association with the Communist party, problems with the mafia and the creation of his own family.
Beautifully shot and framed, "Baarìa"'s major flaw is how aimless it all feels. Being such a personal film, it's obvious that the beauty will vary from the author to the beholder but then why put so many memories into film if they only serve oneself?
It's impossible to avoid comparing this movie to "Amarcord", Fellini is mentioned in the screenplay and is an obvious influence to a character in the film that represents Tornatore. Fellini too delivered a romantic ode to his Rimini, but unlike the master, Tornatore has little to add besides how idyllic life was.
While Fellini added a ceratin kind magic to the retelling of his childhood memories (he was after all a self professed liar who had no trouble making up Arabic princes and outrageous adventures) Tornatore remains a bit more reverential and tries not to offend anyone by trivializing fascism for example.
In the process though, he ends up doing just that, by turning political differences into impersonal things that more than influence the characters and the story, become irrelevant details that steer the movie away from its loving gazes at mountains and ancient villas.
Tornatore avoids all conflict that could make his characters human and create emotional connections, instead choosing to light them appropriately in ways that their beauty too overcomes the ugliness of real life.
His cast is made out of gorgeous Italian people (including Bova and Bellucci who each have exactly one scene and are put in the credits just to attract audiences probably) who spend time looking like young Christy Turlingtons emulating Sophia Loren and the sculpted men Pasolini cast for his own films.
This brings up a dilemma as we wonder if Tornatore truly remembers his childhood like this and is in complete denial of tragedies (one character in the film is notorious for being able to sleep throughout WWII air raids) or if he's trying to make the longest "visit Sicily" commercial in history.
Despite all the time we spend in Baarìa we are never able to create an encompassing vision of the town and we definitely aren't tempted to revisit it.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee **1/2

Director: Rebecca Miller
Cast: Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin
Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci
Ryan McDonald, Zoe Kazan, Mike Binder, Maria Bello
Robin Weigert, Shirley Knight

How do you engage an audience and make them become interested in a character? First you have them believe said character has qualities we want to discover.
Pippa Lee (Wright Penn) is "a mystery, an enigma..." says one of her friends (Binder) minutes into the film.
So check, we have something to unravel.
Then you go and try to solve said mystery by putting together pieces of a puzzle. Therefore we go back in time as Pippa narrates her life to make us understand where she is now.
And since we don't really know what it is exactly we're trying to discover we let the characters engage us.
We learn how Pippa (played by Lively as a younger version) ran away from home, escaping her lunatic mom (Bello) and passive dad (Tim Guinee). She ends up living with her lesbian aunt (Weigert) and her girlfriend (Moore) only to end up becoming addicted to pills and falling in love with-and marrying-a publishing editor (Arkin) who's thirty years her senior.
And this is where we first meet her, she's just moved in with her husband to a retirement community trying to find something new to do, while learning that she might be going insane.
Written and directed by Miller (who also wrote the book the film is based on) "The Lives of Pippa Lee" is obviously its creator's lovechild and as such Miller has trouble knowing what to tell, what to conceal and she doesn't want to give us a bad impression about the people she so devotedly wrote, re-wrote and directed.
Therefore the characters are actually very interesting, even if sometimes they're stuck with ridiculous dialogues and selfconscious quips, but there is absolutely no real plot to follow.
She just keeps inserting new elements (even if they're old because they're Dickensian flashbacks) to make her heroine more appealing.
One of those elements includes new neighbor Chris (Reeves) who more than not turns out to be an excuse for Miller to pull all her deus ex machina moves.
But even with all her tricks and stylistic juxtapositions Miller can never really justify what she's doing and the "many" lives of Pippa Lee are reduced to her being single and then married.
Working with Wright Penn as top accomplice ("to be perfectly honest I've had enough of being an enigma" she teases) they make an event out of what turns out to be a not quite fascinating life.
The actress is at her best, she's tender and loving with Arkin, she's motherhood personified with the actors who play her kids (Kazan and McDonald) and she does her best Marcia Cross when she has to share scenes with her neurotic friend (Ryder).
Underneath her undeniable sexiness and appeal Wright Penn is above all bewitching. Try to take your eyes away from her and you won't be able to.
If only the movie had something else to say (we often wonder why do we need to know about this woman's life) instead of settling for facile resolutions and awkward quirk, then we would have been in for a real treat.
Because as it is, the movie comes, goes and Pippa is still as much of a mystery to us when the movie ends. "I feel like this is just the beginning" she says in the last scene, but perhaps only Miller is willing to go on this journey with her.