Sicily! (1999)

There's a particular kind of film that sits in your hands like a cold stone. Admirable in its weight, its density, its refusal to be anything other than what it is. You can see the craft in it. You can respect the conviction. And yet you cannot quite bring yourself to love it. Sicilia! is that film for me, and I've been sitting with it ever since trying to work out whether that's the film's failure or mine.

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub adapt Elio Vittorini's novel in the only way they know how: with absolute, unsparing rigour. A man returns to Sicily after years living abroad. He moves through the island, has conversations, reconnects with his mother, encounters figures from the landscape and the past. That's more or less the shape of it. But plot summary feels almost beside the point here, because Straub-Huillet aren't making a film about things happening. They're making a film about image, text, and place existing together in the same frame, and asking you to sit with that.

The tableaux are static and meticulously composed. The Mediterranean light is stark and genuinely beautiful. The faces, mostly non-professionals, are worn and expressive in the way that lived experience tends to be. Conversations unspool in long takes, the dialogue delivered in a deliberate, almost ritualistic cadence that strips away any sense of naturalism. The political undercurrents, memory, displacement, the weight of history on a particular piece of land, are all present, threaded through the texture of the thing rather than announced.

And I found almost none of it emotionally engaging. That's the honest truth of it. I can see what Straub-Huillet are doing. The flatness of the performances is intentional. The glacial pacing is the point. This is cinema stripped of what they'd consider bourgeois comfort, a formal system that refuses to seduce you or let you off the hook. For devotees of their work, that rigour is precisely where the value lives. I get that argument. I genuinely do.

But there's a difference between a film that's demanding and a film that's inert, and for long stretches Sicilia! tips into the latter. I kept finding myself admiring the integrity of the enterprise while simultaneously clock-watching. That's not a great place to be as a viewer. It reminded me a little of watching One Way or Another (1975), another politically charged film that uses formal distance as a kind of provocation, though Sara Gómez's film crackles with an energy that Straub-Huillet seem actively uninterested in generating here.

What I keep coming back to is the question of who this is actually for. If you're already inside the world of radical avant-garde formalism, if Straub-Huillet are filmmakers whose entire project you've bought into, then Sicilia! probably gives you exactly what you're looking for. It's consistent. It's uncompromising. It earns the word "austere" in a way most films that get called that simply don't. But if you're coming to it curious, open, willing to be challenged but hoping to be moved, it will almost certainly leave you on the outside looking in.

That's not me dismissing it out of hand. There is beauty here, real beauty, and a seriousness of purpose that's increasingly rare. It's the kind of film I'm glad exists even though I can't honestly say I enjoyed watching it. Some films earn respect without delivering pleasure, and this is one of them. I'd recommend reading about it as readily as I'd recommend sitting down with it.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1999  | Watched: 2026-04-02

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