Sicily! (1999)
★★ — Sicily! (1999)
Sicily! (released in some territories as Sicilia!) is a 66-minute film from 1999, co-directed by the long-standing creative partnership of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and produced across Italy, France, and Germany with support from Pierre Grise Productions and the CNC. It is adapted from the novel Conversazione in Sicilia by Elio Vittorini, first published in 1941, a work that carries considerable weight in the Italian literary canon for its mix of autobiographical memory, political allegory, and poetic dialogue. The film follows a man who returns to his native Sicily after years living in New York, reconnecting with the island through a series of conversations: with an orange picker, with fellow passengers on a train, with his mother, and with a knife-sharpener. It is, on the surface, a quiet homecoming story. In practice, it is something considerably more demanding than that.
Straub and Huillet worked together from the early 1960s until Huillet's death in 2006, producing a body of work that sits at the far, uncompromising end of European art cinema. Their method was consistent and recognisable: non-professional actors, fixed camera positions, texts delivered with deliberate formality, and a refusal to conceal the constructed nature of the image. Sicily! is very much of a piece with that approach, and it arrives at a point in their career when the style was fully formed, polished but unremarkable to anyone coming to it fresh. The cast, including Gianni Buscarino, Vittorio Vigneri, Angela Nugara, Carmelo Maddio, and Angela Durantini, are not professional screen actors in the conventional sense, which is entirely in keeping with the directors' long-held preference for a kind of performance that keeps psychological realism at arm's length. If you have spent time with other Italian cinema from the same era, such as the films reviewed here under No Dogs or Italians Allowed or Call Me by Your Name, you will know how varied the Italian tradition is, and Sicily! occupies a very specific, self-imposed corner of it.
The film sits within a broader conversation about what cinema is for, a question that crops up whenever you look at drama stripped back to near-essentials, as with Yi Yi or, in a very different register, Salaam Cinema. Where those films use restraint to draw you closer, Straub-Huillet's version of formalism tends to keep the viewer at a studied distance. Whether that distance is a feature or a flaw is more or less the entire argument around this film, and it is one that serious critics have been having for decades without resolution.
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.
That tension between respect and enjoyment is something I keep coming back to with films like this. There is a version of me that wants to defend Sicily! on principle, to argue that difficulty is not a reason to dismiss something, and I do think its rigour is genuine rather than affected. But honesty requires admitting that integrity and watchability are not the same thing, and a film that prompts you to glance at the runtime is not doing everything it could. I will always make time for cinema that takes itself seriously, but I find I recommend Sicily! with qualifications rather than warmth. It belongs on a syllabus more comfortably than it belongs on a Friday evening.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1999 | Watched: 2026-04-02
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