On demand: "The Night of the Shooting Stars/La Notte di San Lorenzo"

1982's The Night of the Shooting Stars was another of the Taviani brothers' studies of hardscrabble Italian life - this time, in and around a small, sundappled village as World War II nears its end. From a distance, San Martino appears deserted, its houses daubed with green crosses that signify they're set to be blown up by the occupying Germans. The people, though, are to be found underground, either in trenches dug into the surrounding fields or in the basements of local government buildings, awaiting liberation or some other all-clear. Here, a circumscribed form of life goes on: the movie opens with a hurried, makeshift wedding, bread rations being offered up for a post-ceremony feast, and we eventually proceed to watch the annual harvest being covertly taken in. While everyone waits either for the German threat to recede or for the Americans to arrive, wounds are tended, connections made, plans struck, losses mourned and the community collectively weighs up whether to stand and fight their corner or flee for cover elsewhere. Not for the Tavianis a bunker mentality; instead, they follow a strategy of incessant toing-and-froing. 

This camera roams alongside the milling villagers - hopping from group to group and huddle to huddle, a fellow traveller - the better to record what these people might be thinking, hoping and fearing, their memories of the homes they've been forced to flee. Forty years on - as far removed in time as the film was from the events it depicted - this Night now resembles an early iteration of what's now known as migrant cinema. The Tavianis fall in sympathetic, patient step with a small group who dress initially in mourning-black - the better to blend in with the night - as they come to wind their their way through the countryside, trying to make peace with the fact their pasts are behind them and their lives will never be the same again. (One especially vivid memory: close-ups of hands tossing aside the keys to homes that no longer exist.) All its shuffling and scrambling kicks up an extraordinary wealth of incident; what the filmmakers proceed from appears less a conventional screenplay than an authentically ragged, worked-over patchwork of anecdote, yarns passed down from one generation to the next, everyday reminiscences that assumed greater significance in retrospect. By 1982, the war years had started to be approached almost as folk myth, touched by magic and wonder as well as horror. The small miracle the Tavianis describe and commemorate here is that people still looked out for one another, making love as well as war; that goodness prevailed; and that some part of humanity lived to tell the tale.

The Night of the Shooting Stars is available to rent via Prime Video.