2006 Italy

SUNDAY 3RD JUNE 10.00 am
TUESDAY 5TH JUNE 8.00 pm
RUNNING TIME 96MINUTES

SYNOPSIS

A nearly sightless boy’s discovery of the possibilities of recorded sound gives Cristiano Bortone both a cinematic and emotional basis for his heart-tugger Red Like the Sky. Based on the childhood experiences of film sound editor, Mirco Mencacci, the gently conceived film juggles crowd-pleasing sentiments directly from Cinema Paradiso about the love of movies with  anti-authoritarian views that make the film classically Italian. The film has won many festival awards including the Audience Award for the Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival 2008.

REVIEW BY ROBERT KOEHLER

Ten-year-old Mirco (Luca Capriotti) is first seen being raised by loving parents near Pisa in 1970, but an accident involving a hunting rifle leaves him with such poor vision that all he can see are blurs and shadows. Since Italian law prevents blind and nearly blind children from attending general public schools, Mirco is sent to Genoa, home of Italy’s most respected school for the blind, which is run by a rather stern director (Norman Mozzato).

Between the director — who seems to take his own blindness as a license for being harsh to everyone — and school bully Valerio (Andrea Gussoni), Mirco endures a testy welcoming. Pointedly, the school is a Catholic-run institution and Mirco is a vocal non-believer, allowing Bortone to make additional anti-clerical points. Kindly teacher Don Giulio (Paolo Sassanelli) tries to coax Mirco to learn Braille, but the boy resists, finding some refuge with tubby buddy Simone (Simone Gulli) and stumbling upon a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. Don Giulio’s class assignment to do a paper on the four seasons becomes a ticket for Mirco to record natural as well as foley * sounds to suggest the aural passing of the seasons.

Bortone’s scenario, in collaboration with Monica Zapelli (The Hundred Steps) and Paolo Sassanelli, tends to be facile when setting up dramatic points; thus, Mozzato’s director is predictably angry when learning about Mirco’s creative form of audio ‘writing’ placing Sassanelli’s Don Giulio in the role of the liberal mentor who recognizes a talented diamond in the rough.

Mirco, as expressed by Capriotti in a fine child performance, is full of boldness and stubbornness, a ready-made pint-sized movie hero who obviously will triumph over the odds. Alongside these and other calculations, such as Mirco winning the affections of sweet and smart Francesca (Francesca Maturanza), daughter of the school’s caretaker, Red Like the Sky plays like a somewhat romanticized re-telling of an actual young life that was likely much harsher around the edges.

At the same time, Bortone applies a solid command of emotional build and crescendos, as well as pace, to deliver an entertainment that also refuses to insult audiences. A more creative filmmaker might have drawn stronger visual connections from Mirco’s developing love affair with sound and its possibilities, but Bortone wittily shows the ways in which incredible effects (such as the roar of a dragon for a fairy tale story that Mirco and Francesca hatch) can be made with humble means. Sound mix (by Stefano Campus) and edit (led by Mencacci himself) are superb standouts amid a fine technical package, with Ezio Bosso’s score perhaps dipping a little too much into the Michael Nyman playbook.

* A foley artist [or footsteps editor] is a technician who adds sound effects such as doors closing, rain falling, etc. during the postproduction sound dubbing process.

Source: www.variety.com/review Robert Koehler posted 15/1/2008, accessed and edited 9/2/2012.