Sparrow

A film set in Sicily. The year is 1854. There is cholera in Catania. Maria is being raised in a convent. She is to become a nun and her vows are near. Because of the epidemic the convent is emptied. She is sent to her family. The family has moved to a house in the country. Maria sees the outside for the first time. Trees, fields, a river and neighbours. There is a family in the next house. Nino is their son. The two talk. From there the film is a story of opening. Maria learns to laugh, to run and to talk. None of it existed in the convent. Nino shows her a bird. A bird kept in a cage; its name is the film's title. The epidemic ends. Maria has to go back to the convent. There is a problem. Her family has no money and her father wants to marry off the daughter from his second marriage. Maria's return to the convent is a necessity. There is a dowry for only one girl. Her stepmother says so plainly. What the narrative is interested in is not religion but arithmetic: its idea is that making the girl a nun is not a matter of faith but of a family's budget. Maria goes back. She takes her vows. Then she learns that Nino has married her sister. The last section takes place in the convent. Maria's condition breaks down. The narrative gives this not as an illness but as a result. The source is Giovanni Verga's novel, one of the known texts of Sicilian literature. Franco Zeffirelli filmed it in his own country and made the landscape part of the narrative. The images are soft and warm; the costume and design are careful. Angela Bettis, Johnathon Schaech and Sinéad Cusack are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Italian period film and adaptations from literature. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hardness; the narrative is too ornamented and the beauty of the images sometimes suppresses the weight of the tragedy.