Sicily! (1999)
★★ — Sicily! (1999)
Sicily! (released in Italian as Sicilia!) is an adaptation of Elio Vittorini's 1941 novel Conversazione in Sicilia, a book that had already carried considerable political weight in Italy given its publication under Fascism. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the Franco-German couple who had been working in near-total opposition to mainstream cinema since the 1960s, shot the film on location in Sicily with a cast of mostly non-professional actors, continuing the rigorous working method they had refined across decades of low-budget, politically austere productions. By 1999 they were well into their late period, with films like From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979) and Too Early, Too Late (1982) behind them, and their reputation firmly established among a small but devoted international art-cinema audience.
Sicilia! (1999), the austere collaboration between Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, is precisely the kind of film that defies conventional praise or dismissal. The film unfolds as a series of static, meticulously composed tableaux: a man returns to Sicily after years abroad, conversations unfold in long takes with non-professional actors speaking in deliberate, almost ritualistic cadence, and the landscape itself becomes a silent protagonist. There is beauty here (the stark Mediterranean light, the weathered faces, the political undercurrents of memory and displacement) but it's a beauty that demands work, not surrender. And that's the crux of it: Sicilia! is intellectually interesting without ever being emotionally or sensorially engaging. The pacing is glacial, the performances intentionally flat, the narrative fragmented to the point of abstraction. For admirers of Straub-Huillet's radical formalism, this rigour is the point, a cinema stripped of bourgeois comforts, forcing the viewer to confront image, text, and place on their own stark terms. But judged as an experience to be watched rather than studied, it remains distant, hermetic, and ultimately inert. You admire its integrity while checking how many minutes remain. An uncompromising artefact of avant-garde cinema that earns respect without delivering pleasure. Important for what it represents; difficult to recommend for what it is.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1999 | Watched: 2026-04-02
Where to watch (US)
Stream: Fandor
Physical: Amazon UK
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
