Word: mooning
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...passions. Kaos dramatizes four of the short fictions Pirandello collected in his 15-volume A Story for Every Day in the Year. Three (The Other Son, The Jar and Requiem) are just fine, anecdotes about longing and power in which the inexplicable nuzzles up against the predictable. A fourth (Moon Sickness) and an epilogue, which lures the author into his own imaginary world, are small miracles of narrative. They raise the folkloric to folk artistry...
Twenty days after her marriage to a gentle farmer named Batà (Claudio Bigagli), pretty Sidora (Enrica Maria Modugno) is startled to hear the baying of an animal in torment. It is Batà, who, as he explains, suffers fearful convulsions each night of the full moon. A scholar of his own illness, Batà instructs Sidora to lock herself away from him, but as the moon waxes he breaks through a window and attacks her. Come the next full moon, Sidora is prepared for the worst and the best. Her handsome cousin Saro (Massimo Bonetti) will protect her and, if God hears...
...Giotto fresco; the actors find precision in the volcanic gestures of Italian opera. In one scene, Batà sits alone in the town square to confess the origin of his ailment, and a flashback shows the infant Batà in a field at night, his huge eyes transfixed by the harlot moon. No minimalist torpor for the Tavianis--every frame is over the top and on the money...
...epilogue, Pirandello (Omero Antonutti) visits his old village two years after his mother's death. An aged carriage driver seems vaguely familiar; then Luigi remembers--"You're Saro!"--and the driver smiles back, suddenly as young as he was in Moon Sickness, and as vibrant as only a creature of the imagination can be. Once at home Luigi conjures up a vision of his mother, who recalls an incident from her adolescence, when she and her siblings stopped at an isolated pumice-stone island near Malta. They climbed to the top of a white dune, then bounded gaily down toward...
...missing from this puzzling geography that would allow us to view the map redrawn, to sit back and behold the brand-new country of our concern and comprehension? The piece is not really missing, of course; you just don't see it, like the shy side of the moon. Yet the missing piece is the one that counts...