MOVIES : Darkness and Light Over Tuscany : For 40 years, Italy’s Taviani brothers have devoted themselves to idealistic fables that shed light on darkness

“Nostalgia doesn’t interest us, but memory is a different matter,” says Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani, whose new movie, “Fiorile,” made in collaboration with his brother Vittorio, travels into the past to tell a rural Italian folk tale that they hope sheds some light on life in Italy today. “Memory must be nurtured because coming to grips with the past makes it easier to decipher the reality we live in now.”

“ ‘Fiorile’ pivots on the idea that we must pay for the sins of our ancestors, and beliefs of this sort are typical of folk tales,” adds Vittorio Taviani of the film, which opens Wednesday, “but I believe the will of man can be stronger than any curse.”

An unabashedly idealistic film, “Fiorile”--like all the Tavianis’ work--is infused with issues of class struggle, and juxtaposes the stately rubble of the past against utopian visions of the future. Acknowledging the politically charged Italian Neorealist school of the ‘40s and ‘50s as the main influence on their work, the Tavianis expand on the stark Neorealist tradition by dressing it up with theatrical metaphors often drawn from history. However, the populist beliefs central to Neorealism remain at the heart of their work. Though “Fiorile” was recently dismissed by New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane as being “flawed with a rather broad streak of ideological sentimentality,” the Tavianis’ idealism is viewed by many as the great strength of their work, and it’s something for which they make no apologies.

“There are two forces at work in this film,” says Paolo, speaking through an interpreter during an interview at a Hollywood hotel, “and it moves through the clash between these two energies; there’s the negative force of gold, and the force of those who oppose it in the name of love. And we’re not just speaking here of the love between a man and a woman, although that’s an important part of the film; we refer also to the love of the idea of a different and better world. For Jean, the young hero who appears early in the film, the memory of the principles of fraternity and justice is very prominent in his mind, and this memory represents another kind of love.”

The same could be said of the Tavianis, who were born in San Miniato, Italy (Vittorio in 1929, Paolo in 1931). The sons of a lawyer who rejected the Catholicism that dominated Italy at the time in favor of more liberal ideas, the Tavianis’ early childhood was cultured and relatively idyllic.

“Our first experience with the spectacle of entertainment wasn’t film--it was the dramas of Verdi and Puccini,” Vittorio recalls. “As children, if we did well in school, our father would reward us with a trip to Florence to see an opera. I can remember seeing the red stage curtain go up and suddenly a torrent of emotion would be unleashed before my eyes--it thrilled us completely, and when we returned to our little town we’d dress up in rags and play out our child’s version of what we’d just experienced.”

While in their early teens, the Tavianis’ lives were disrupted when World War II descended on their small village in 1944. Their memory of the destruction wrought on the village by the Nazis was to be the subject of their most critically acclaimed film to date, “The Night of the Shooting Stars.” The seeds for that film, however, were planted in 1946 when they had an experience that was to change their lives.

“When we were teen-agers, just by chance we happened into a movie theater,” Paolo recalls. “Several people were leaving as we were going in and they told us, ‘Forget it, it’s a really boring film,’ but we went in anyway and found ourselves confronted on the screen by the war exactly as we’d lived it just a few years before. The film was Roberto Rossellini’s ‘Paisan,’ and seeing it made us realize that through art we can gain an understanding of our experiences that’s greater than what we derive from living them directly. By the time we left the theater we’d decided to dedicate our lives to making movies. Living in the provinces as we did, we knew this was going to be hard--we were the sons of a lawyer so we were expected to be lawyers. Nonetheless, we made a pact that for 10 years we’d try to make movies, and if in 10 years we hadn’t succeeded, we’d kill ourselves!”

“So, we started writing about film for trade papers, saw every film that came through town, and saw lots of American movies,” says Vittorio, picking up the story. “John Ford was the most important American director for us--we were fascinated by the relationship he creates between his characters and the immense landscapes that surround them. Ford simultaneously exalts his characters and dwarfs them in their relationship to nature; he seems to say that although what man knows is very important and wonderful, what he doesn’t know is infinitely greater.

“When we were growing up America seemed very far away, and we envisioned it as a place where strange technological things happened,” he adds. “I remember the first time we saw an American--we ran into two U.S. soldiers on a little country road who were part of an advance party, and they were brushing their teeth with their rifles slung over their shoulders. They seemed like creatures of great simplicity and strength, and it was like encountering an entirely new, oddly childish breed of people. It was wonderful--American culture seemed so young.”

Completing their first film in 1954, a short titled “San Miniato, July 1944,” (later to be expanded into “Night of the Shooting Stars”), the Tavianis went on to release “A Man for Burning” in 1962 and “The Marriage Outlaws” in 1964. They didn’t begin to hit their stride until 1967, however, with the release of “The Subversives,” which combined documentary footage of a prominent Communist leader’s funeral with the stories of four people who are profoundly affected by his death. Two years later they completed “Under the Sign of Scorpio,” which was followed in 1971 by “Saint Michael Had a Rooster,” a tale of social conflict in Italy at the end of the 19th Century inspired by a Tolstoy story.

The Tavianis didn’t make it to America until 1977 when their seventh feature, “Padre Padrone,” the tale of a young Sardinian who survives a traumatizing relationship with his domineering father, premiered at the New York Film Festival. “I remember thinking that young New Yorkers would have a hard time relating to our story of a poor shepherd who lives alone in his hut,” recalls Vittorio Taviani of the film, which was their first to win an international audience. “But after it was over, many young people came up to us and said, ‘This man’s loneliness in his little hut, and his need to communicate, are the same as our loneliness in our apartments.’ ” (The Tavianis have made just one film in the United States: “Good Morning Babylon” (1987), the story of two Italian artisans who come to America to work in the movies during the early days of Hollywood.)

The Tavianis have looked to Italian fables for source material for the bulk of their films, and “Fiorile,” a romantic fable spanning several generations of an Italian family, has roots there as well. The film opens with a shot of a sleek automobile gliding down the highway through present-day Tuscany; Luigi Benedetti (played by Lino Capolicchio), his French wife (Constanze Engelbrecht) and their two children are en route to visit a reclusive grandfather the children have never met. From that simple beginning, the film time travels into the past and blossoms into a fable revolving around the idea that history repeats itself, and love and money are eternally at war.

“This is a story our mother used to tell us when we were children, and she heard it from her mother who heard it through her mother--it was always through women that this particular story was told,” Paolo points out. “This story supposedly took place near our little village in Tuscany, in a peasant hamlet at the end of the 17th Century when Napoleon’s troops passed through the area.

“We were struck by this story when we were children, and we thought of making a film based on it for many years,” he continues. “Two aspects of the story were compelling to us: the injustice of a young innocent who is killed, and the devastating force of money. This story returned to us quite vividly a few years ago because Italy went through a period in which the shadow of pervasive corruption was over us, and the stink of dirty money was in the air. The governing class had made power into a myth and was promoting the idea that the only thing that matters in life is getting ahead and scratching out your own share of power.

“We decided to try to throw a little light on this darkness by making a film based on this old tale about the devastating effects of money, and that’s how the film was born. In making a film, we always begin with concrete realities that concern our personal lives,” he adds, “then we break from that concrete reality and throw ourselves into the great space of imagination and fantasy.”

The greatest bit of poetic license the Tavianis grant themselves with “Fiorile” is in leap-frogging their story from one century to the next as it charts the star-crossed fortunes of the Benedetti family; the linking device in all this episodic time travel is that car cruising through present-day Italy.

“One of the first images that came to us when we began working on the film was the idea of a car traveling from France to Tuscany,” Vittorio says. “We envisioned this car as a kind of spaceship or vehicle for time travel, like something out of a book by Jules Verne, and the car gave us the rhythm of the film, which is conceptually scored to the rhythm of a trip.

“The central challenge of this film was finding a way to combine several different characters and time periods into a single story, and the car moving through time and space opens up the idea of a story with various chapters that allow us to see the relationship between the past and the present. The children in the back seat of the car listen to their father speak, and through the eyes and ears of their imagination we see these chapters from the past come to life.”

Reflecting on the oral tradition of folk fable central to much of the Tavianis’ work, one wonders what the fate of such stories will be as mass media gathers ever more steam.

“Cultural legacies always run the risk of being devoured by new means of communication, but there will always be people who struggle to defend these traditions,” Paolo says. “Moreover, a great anthropologist once said that the human race has 33 narrative lines that are repeated one generation after the next, and what this means is that a story you might invent in L.A. today is probably based on an old story. The way you tell it might make it modern, but its tie with the past is nonetheless present.”

In talking with the Tavianis, one is struck by the fact that they virtually never disagree when it comes to the themes and ideological core of their work. One wonders, however, how this partnership actually functions on a set.

“It’s often the case that several different people will work on a screenplay, so that aspect of our collaboration isn’t unusual,” Vittorio says. “When we’re actually shooting, we simply divide the work in half. Say we have 10 set-ups to do in a day--Paolo will direct five, then I’ll direct five, because the crew must have a single point of reference.

“By this point we’ve developed an almost telepathic kind of communication and on the set all it takes is a look to communicate that something isn’t working,” he continues. “We’re two very different characters when we play tennis, but when we’re making films we’re in perfect harmony. The creative relationship we share would be difficult if we were painters, but one of the unique things about film is that it’s a collaborative form that requires many different forces to unite.”

“Kurosawa has said that whenever he’s shooting a film he keeps a copy of ‘War and Peace’ on his night table, and every evening he reads a few pages, and we do the same thing,” adds Paolo in conclusion. “Some people read the Bible--we read Tolstoy. His wonderful writing makes us feel less alone, and reminds us that in other times, under other skies, man has sought the truth.”