Pizzicata

Edoardo Winspeare, from Italy's impoverished Salentine peninsula (the heel of the Italian boot), previously made a documentary in his homeland, Saint Paul and the Tarantula, about love-crazed local women who dance for hours and hours in herky-jerky circles, claiming to have been bitten by tarantulas. Winspeare thought to convert his interest in "Tarantism" into a first feature film. Pizzicata is his made-up tale (he wrote and directed) of one such young Salentine woman who, her lover dead, turns into a barefooted whirling dervish.

Pizzicata offers her mournful story. It's 1943, and Cosima (Chiara Torelli), the daughter of a poor farmer, finds true love dropped from the sky: a wounded Italian-American pilot, Tony (Fabio Frascero), whom she nurses back to health. As it turns out, he speaks perfect Italian, so he's introduced to the local populace as Cosima's cousin. They can't declare their love, because Tony would be discovered by the Fascists and shot as the enemy. Meanwhile, Cosima is courted by a testy neighborhood guy, Pasquale (Paolo Massafra), who suspects something is going.

This obvious narrative unfolds slowly, perhaps to simulate the rhythms of rural life. Unfortunately, the non-professional cast lacks charisma; whenever filmmaker Winspeare seems lost in his narrative, he resorts to some drab pastoral song-and-dance by stiff-before-the-camera locals. The stabs at ethnography aren't enough to move the story. You'll ask yourself: when will the war end, when will this tedious picture end, so the couple maybe can get together?

-- Gerald Peary