The appeal of this vision of Lombardy life, at the turn of the century, is rooted in its proximity to "real life," which is forever and always the middlebrow's most unshakable criterion of artistic excellence. Actually, the vision is not close to all of real life, but only to that part of it that is clean, pure, healthy, edifying, inspiring, or righteously enraging. It is tempting to see Ermanno Olmi's no-hoke representation of Italian peasant life as a level-headed, soft-spoken rebuttal to Bernardo Bertolucci's obstreperous 1900. Every facet of this exact, ethnographic fiction is implicit in the thirty-years-old tenets of neo-realism, except perhaps the lush, painterly lighting that is spread like Betty Crocker cake frosting on top of the warm, solid subject matter underneath. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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