A 66-minute Brechtian elocution executed with stone cold precision, Straub-Huillet’s SICILY! is a reworking of Elio Vittorini’s novel CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY, a man returns to Sicily, his fatherland from New York after a Homeresque absence, encounters a fruit vendor when he disembarks, several passengers on the train (one of whom decries the stink of underclass!), visits his mother and finally engages a conversation with a knife-grinder (a faux-father figure who defies conventionality, he never sharpens knives or scissors).

Well attuned to their modus operandi, the shots are rigid, mostly static close-ups, beauteously black and white, and routinely extend their duration long after the action ends. A slowly panning scenic shot appears three times as a signpost of scenic transition, and the most stimulating sequences is the son-mother tête-à-tête about the father who is not there. Angela Nugara, who plays the matronly mother, whose timbre possesses such a cadence-flowing musicality that her stentorian recitation sound like a mellifluous sonata sans accompaniment.

But the contents of their dialogue, are coldly removed from gracefulness, the son (Buscarino) accuses his mother for driving away his father, a skirt-chaser who congenitally courts other women (treat them like “queens”) and leaves his wife neglected and aggrieved. The selected texts are confrontational and even transgressive, the mother will have none of sufferance in silence, she is a proactive doer, and counters her son’s patriarchal blame with phlegmatic unregeneracy, even leveling with him the affair she once was involved, totally confessionally, but soul-shattering poignancy seeps through her adamant steeliness, that is the ne plus ultra of the riveting distancing effect advocated by Brecht and his votaries.

Courtesy to its brevity, SICILY! doesn’t transpire to be a patience-testing gargantua belongs to the slow cinema phenomenon, and as an ideological treatise exalting the resilience of proletariat, Straub-Huillet’s depersonalizing approach is simply too felicitous to demur.

referential entries: Straub-Huillet’s THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (1968, 7.1/10); Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s THE 3 PENNY OPERA (1931, 7.3/10).