The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Saw The Tree of Wooden Clogs, an Italian film about a farming community. It feels at first like a James Harriot book come to life. The farmers are adorable and cute, singing psalms and knowingly chuckling at the young couple which is starting to form. We are rescued from complete cloying cuteness by an early-film goose chase which ends with the goose being caught and abruptly beheaded. So, this is a more warts-and-all depiction, though it does lean quite heavily on the bucolic side. There's a farmer who hates his own son, for example, but their relationship is never allowed to smoulder, it just abruptly explodes every so often. This leaves this leaves things feeling more anarchic and sort of fun and cute, rather than ominous or distressing which it certainly would be in real life.

Around all of this, there are tons of oblique references to a burgeoning socialist movement. There are student demonstrations and a dude at the fair, ranting about social hierarchies. All of these references are made interestingly absurd because of course the poverty-stricken farmers are the hard-working proletariat and they neither understand nor care about social order. What time do they have to fret about injustice when they are one harvest away from starvation? When there are babies being born, sick cows, bad grain? The message of the film is unclear.

But then there is one final act of injustice which the title refers to and which happens just before the film ends. I believe this is the filmmaker tipping his hand and arguing that it is the duty of we, the leisurely film-goers and wise art-consumers of the world, to defend these noble sons of the soil. Okay.

The film's message is delivered obliquely enough that I need to couch my interpretation in words like "I believe," so it's not heavy-handed at all. It's mostly an engrossing window into the kitchen-sink soap-opera of these people. Will the kid who goes to school ever amount to anything? Will the old man's tomato-growing scheme pay off? Will the cow die? These are the engines of the film. It was slow but interesting I thought.