Word: saint
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FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI has fallen victim to the youth movement. In an attempt to tell the story of St. Francis of Assisi as a medieval eccentiric. Zeffirelli runs the risk of presenting the saint as a progenitor of Woodstock nation. His film succeeds in tracing a parallel between then and now, and thereby fails to become an acceptable work of art. At a time when hard-boiled movies are derigeur, a film on a religious theme can appear embarrassingly sentimental. Zeffirelli's has personal interpretation of the St. Francis legend does just that. And at a time when "Godspell" has recently...
Brother Sun, Sister Moon covers only a short period of the saint's life; his return from the war between Assisi and the rival town of Perugia, his subsequent illness and conversion, the rebuilding of the ruined church of San Damiano, and his trip to Rome to seek advice from Pope Innocent III. Given this limited time-span and the painstaking efforts Zeffirelli makes to focus on the reasons for Francis's conduct, he explains astonishingly little of what was happening in twelfth-century Italy, both according to historical fact and to his own fiction. The war could...
...Rousseauian utopia, mars the simplicity of the tale just as badly. Treating the legend of St. Francis as a Christian fairy-tale might well have served Zeffirelli's artistic talents better than this poorly conceived Whole Earth Catalogue of the life, loves and politics of Italy's patron saint...
...baron was born here during la Belle Epoque, and grew up on this 314-acre estate in Saint-Nauphary, in southwestern France. The flourishing vineyards produced excellent wines, named for the estate, La Fumade. The baron married, had a son, and lived a life of rural gentility, trying none too skillfully to manage his estate, getting through the lean years with loans added to the mortgage. By the end of World War II, the baron's fortunes were as dilapidated as his estate; his wife and son were dead, the vineyards diseased. Then...
...Repairing to a junkyard, which handles only clean and cute junk, they outfit themselves as a band of strolling players devoted to acting out the Passion against the picturesque backdrop of the modern Jerusalem (Manhattan!). The players hop, skip and bounce relentlessly through their routines as if the relevant saint for them was St. Vitus. Not that any of these rolling pebbles bring any passion to the Passion, since what they want to elicit from the audience is a series of ahs rather than a sense of awe. Nor that New York, in Director David Greene's vision, looks...