This is not a movie. This is a string of scenes, many of them photographed with remarkable, original beauty. It's a fresco of life in Southern Italy from the 1920s to the present. But there are far too many individual scenes, and they don't coalesce to form a movie.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't watch it. Quite to the contrary. A lot of it is really remarkably beautiful.
But, unlike in Cinema Paradiso, the characters don't really come alive. It is not, unlike that masterpiece, a movie about people. It is a collection of often very beautiful images.
A warning: the subtitles were often very hard to read on the copy I had. They did not stand out against the often very bright background.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't watch it. Quite to the contrary. A lot of it is really remarkably beautiful.
But, unlike in Cinema Paradiso, the characters don't really come alive. It is not, unlike that masterpiece, a movie about people. It is a collection of often very beautiful images.
A warning: the subtitles were often very hard to read on the copy I had. They did not stand out against the often very bright background.