New York Dispatch. 3.

When in doubt in Sicily, just remember the following terms - baciamo le mani (we kiss the hands), cornuto (horned one or cuckold), picciotto (little man or enforcer). Mafioso, by Alberto Lattuada, barely known today, is a warm dark satire about the dark customs of Sicilians.

There's a somber gritty neo-realist look to the 1962 film, as there was to much of what was filmed in the south of Italy through the early 1960s, as if these regions were foreign territory to the Northern Italians making the movies. They were indeed another world, and the film plays with the longstanding divisions and prejudices that separated Italians from each other.

The veteran actor Alberto Sordi plays the everyman Antonio Badalamenti, a soldier in the army of Sicilians who migrated to Milan and other Northern cities for work and a better life in the days when Sicily was a ruin of war. Antonio works in an automobile  factory, measuring efficiency - the notion of a Sicilian in such a job would have amused Northern Italians at the time, given the widespread prejudice that their southern compatriots were lazy and unreliable.

Antonio is the average guy, trying to be modern, alternately bumbling and showing off, with a blonde wife, two blonde daughters, and one foot still stuck in Sicily. He's all set to impress his family on his first visit home to the seaside town of Calamo, with its crumbling pavement and his sister who has a thick moustache. All his old friends are still there, most of them "sitting down," the local tern for unemployed. His gaunt father still wears a hat to bed. His stern mother rarely smiles, and certainly not at her blonde daughter-in-law, who looks like she arrived from another planet. Culture-clash jokes take you through at least a third of Mafioso. Even though the script exploits the clichés of the time in a way that would be politically incorrect today, the camera surveys the landscape as if it's on an ethnographic expedition, and you laugh. There's never a false note from the cast, thanks of course to Lattuada's hand with the ensemble, many of whom were native Sicilians.

We soon learn that the real power in Calamo is the local mafia don (played by Ugo Attanasio, Sordi's brother-in-law). Like any good local boy, Antonio kisses Don Vincenzo's hand, and more. Once it's clear that the Sicilian émigré never lost his skill at marksmanship, he's given a job: hit man. (The distributor of Mafioso has requested that certain details not be divulged.) Suffice it to say that Antonio does his job well; with a little reluctance, he's as good a killer as he's a pleasant employee in the Milan factory and a loving father to two girls. One's upbringing is hard to shake, even on a two-week vacation. Shooting a gun is sort of like riding a bicycle - so natural that you and your friends can make jokes about it.

Mafioso is a mordant tale about mob vassalage, never overplayed and always funny - long before Hollywod cashed in on mob stereotypes. As Antonio, Sordi is jolly and obliging, which makes his dutiful act all the terrifying when it happens. It's even more terrifying when the family man goes right on with his life after the crime. This is a film that Hitchcock would have loved, for its taut exquisite comic timing as much as for its cold look at local customs. After all, a hit man is a kind of terrorist, and Antonio is the kind of killer whom you'd invite home.

Bamako is an altogether different kind of journey, a journey home to the capital of the West African country of Mali, a return to the town of his birth for the filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. The occasion is a trial, but as in Mafioso, understanding the trial means adjusting to some local customs. The courtroom is a courtyard into which children and chickens wander. A ram is tethered to one of the walls. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are on trial. We're not told how the court was formed, and the defendants are not there to argue on their own behalf. Yet while we don't hear from the accused, we hear about their crimes - economic ruin, the privatization of essential services, impoverishment of an entire continent, and the erosion of hope for the future. From time to time, a witness cries out in anger about sinking downhill after a life of struggle, or an old man just sings his testimony.

These are desperate charges, yet the film doesn't send a simple message of despair. Two scripts are wound together in the courtyard, one of high-minded rhetoric about suffering in the colonial and globalized worlds, another about people just going about their lives - marrying, separating, singing, raising children, living in spite of the bigger picture.

There's a lot of eloquence in Bamako, especially when witnesses raise the issue of indebtedness that requires countries to pay more to the banks than they pay for education or health care. When one witness raises the issue of the war in Iraq, she points out that a fraction of the resources that were poured into that war could accomplish extraordinary things in a place like Africa. Another reason not to have been there in the first place.

Ultimately, Bamako is more like an opera than a trial, a series of arias or jeremiads repeating the same chorus. The austere courtyard looks like a stage set, with the cameras and children and animals visible, as if to remind you that we're dealing with something painfully real. If the film audience is hearing it for the first time, it should listen carefully. But the grievances and denunciations have all been aired before. You get a sense of the power of cinema to bring drama to cries of help, and you're reminded of the futility of cinema to do much more.

Posted by dwhudson at September 30, 2006 5:13 AM