Fiorile

During Napoleon’s Italian campaign, Elisabetta Benedetti falls in love with Jean, the French soldier set to guard the gold. In a moment when his attention is elsewhere, Elisabetta’s brother Corrado steals it, and Jean is shot for a crime he did not commit. The family grows rich on that money, then rotten with it, and their former friends stop calling them the Benedetti and start calling them the Maledetti, the cursed. The film follows that ill luck through two hundred years and several generations; two children on their way to see their grandfather hear the story along the road and start to fear it will reach them too. In the film by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani the real subject is how gold eats away at relations between people. Claudio Bigagli, Galatea Ranzi and Michael Vartan take the parts. It competed at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. The record gives the language as English, though it is Italian.