Baaria (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2009)

Tornatore, much feted for his affectionate portrait of the magical and formative effect of films on a young boy's imagination in 1988's Cinema Paradiso, which could not have been far from autobiography, goes the whole hog in attempting to tell the tale of his Sicilian home town across three generations of a single family. The film moves from the fascist years to the rise of communism as a beacon for the abused peasantry before ending up with a start in a chaotic modern day.
You can see nods to and borrowings from Fellini and Bertolucci in equal measure, amongst others, and fantastical interludes are called in to serve as milestones of import in a hefty 150 minutes that still however manages periodically to leap between decades too quickly like a casual tourist of eras, driven on by a customarily sweeping score from Ennio Morricone that he could quite easily have put together in an afternoon from unused scraps of The Legend of 1900 or Once Upon a Time in America.
It is sweet in places and there are neat background features which vary tellingly to mark the passage of time. It's just too sugary to engage the emotions with any great force. And if I see any more cheeky wide-eyed scamps touting for audience indulgence in Italian films, I'll scweam.

4/10