Way Station

By R.S.

EBOLI

Directed by Francesco Rosi Screenplay by Francesco Rosi, Tonino Guerra, Raffaele La Capria

Exiled from Rome in 1935 by Mussolini's Fascists, Carlo Levi, poet, painter, doctor and political dissident, was sent to a mountain village in Lucania in southern Italy. The book he wrote about this experience, Christ Stopped at Eboli, has become a small modern classic. If the film, which has been carved out of a much longer mini-series originally made for Italian television, does not have quite the stature of the book, it is nonetheless sober, virtuous and quietly absorbing.

The book took its title from the last train stop before Lucania, and the last outpost of the civilization that had nurtured Levi. The implication of the title is that despite the primitive religiosity of the culture that lay beyond Eboli, even the Saviour would have stopped before entering a realm "hedged in by custom and sorrow . . . without comfort or solace." What Levi --played with patient sympathy and intelligence by Gian Maria Volonte -- finds in Lucania is a drunken priest who is sometimes stoned by the village children, a bombastic mayor with the habit of summoning everyone to the town square to hear his empty Fascist orations, doctors whose medical skills are scarcely more advanced than the folk medicine the towns people practice. The hints of a modern world that manage to penetrate this fastness are so sketchy that they are bound to be distorted; Levi sees how totally irrelevant the grand schemes of the modern state -- and not only a totalitarian one -- are to the real needs of these people.

No claim is made that Levi, in a relatively short stay, changed the lives of these people. More likely, they changed his, granting him a more humane and compassionate understanding of the richness of real life. That life goes on, time without end, below and beyond the political illusions that bemuse people with the education and leisure to indulge them. At the abstract level, Levi (and his book's cinematic interpreters) seems to be saying that the simpler the life people lead, the more resistant it is to the forces of change, even when those forces are backed by coercive power. Forty-five years deeper into the 20th century, it would have been easy to romanticize the simple, patient people exemplifying that point. Rosi does not do it. He draws them with full dimensionality, verve and gentle irony. And with a sympathy that never veers into noble-peasant sentimentality. In this cut, Levi's story seems to rush rather suddenly to a conclusion, but even so it is well worth attending.

--R.S.

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