Cinema
Good Morning, Babylon (`15', Lumiere, St Martin's Lane)
Master craftsmen
Hilary Mantel
The secrets of two are the secrets of God,' says the head of the Bonnano family to his younger sons. It is Tuscany, 1913, and the family firm of stonemasons, em- ployed in cathedral restoration, is about to go bankrupt. We first see Nicola and Andrea, the 'golden hands', putting the last perfectionist touches to a fresco of an amiable pot-bellied elephant; then they abseil down a glittering façade into a family celebration turned sour by their father's news.
The directors, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, also know the secrets of two, and brotherhood is one of the themes of this excellent film. The Tavianis are said to work together in such harmony that they direct alternate shots — 'together, always equal', as their master craftsman puts it. Their methods obviously work, and what they have produced is so wonderfully constructed and organised that, by com- parison, most current releases seem to have been thrown together by a director whose' mind is elsewhere. But here we are reassured, as the story progresses, that we are in the hands of people who know exactly what a film should be and what it can do.
The two brothers (Vincent Spano and Joaquim De Almeida) go to America, hoping to make enough money to revive the family business. In a bleak landscape, with a keening wind which echoes the squealing of the pigs they herd, the 'sons of the sons of Michelangelo' find themselves reduced to peasants. 'Had we made ourselves understood we wouldn't have ended up out here,' one of them says. It is the film industry which is to give them the opportunity to make themselves under- stood by using the visual language in which they excel. Just as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages spoke in symbols to a pre- literate population, so, we are told, the early cinema spoke to the immigrants of America — building and buttressing a common culture. It is not just the film's themes that draw the parallel, but its techniques — the logic and symmetry of its composition, the precision with which it presents its harmonious and congruent images. The early scenes are subtitled from Italian, the later scenes are in English but it would have been perfectly compre- hensible without any language at all. No- thing is accidental and nothing is super- flous; each image does its work.
When the brothers make their way to Hollywood, they find it a sort of temporary encampment, reeling with excitement and loud with car horns, the stars of the infant industry tramping about in muddy fields. They fall in love, and in a double ceremony are married to a couple of giddy young dancers (Greta Scacchi and Desiree Beck- er). The air of innocent expectancy in these scenes is as carefully calculated as anything in the film, and the faux-naif manner mirrors the style of the films they see in production. After rough times and menial jobs, the brothers' talent is recognised, and D. W. Griffith (Charles Dance) commis- sions them to build the great white elephants which are seen in the Babylon sequences of Intolerance.
This is not a hymn to Hollywood. In effect, it celebrates the early cinema which the studio system destroyed. Although it is a film about films, it is neither self- absorbed nor self-referential. The film- makers here are visionaries, like the cathedral builders. On a personal level, they have their petty jealousies and quar- rels, but the sense of communal effort is greater than any one person. We do not know even the names of the mediaeval craftsmen who subsumed their individual genius into a 'collective dream'. And the film itself keeps a Brechtian distance from its characters, so that we know that we are not being presented with cinema as a mirror of life; rather, it is proportionate to life, as good architecture is proportionate to the human body. A cruel bereavement separates the brothers, makes them un- equal and therefore vulnerable, and they meet only when they are dying, on a first world war battlefield. As individuals, time and chance destroy them; their works of stone and celluloid remain.
The film isn't perfect; over-emphasis occasionally spoils its charm, and some- times the pace slows. The final scene teeters on the brink of bathos. Some might think its politics are offensively simple, but it isn't really a political film. It is a very human and enjoyable one, its humour and gravity in perfect balance. Clarity and optimism will make it last. Above all, it is a triumph of disciplined imagination. It is clear that the Taviani brothers feel, them- selves, what they make Griffith say: 'I love movie-making, and I respect it.'
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