Bentu
A little essay on waiting.
 
Bentu, as Salvatore Mereu himself explained, was born as an end-of-year essay for the cinema course held by the director himself at the University of Cagliari.
The almost non-existent budget and the very original nature of the project have inevitably influenced some of the choices made, starting from the "betrayal" of the ending of the novel by Antonio Cossu on which the film is based film.
However, it is difficult to imagine a different treatment and result.
Even the choice to bring Bentu to meet the public in cinemas, after the invitation to the Giornate degli authors of the latest Venice Film Festival, appears inevitable and perfectly coherent with the spirit of the work itself.
Once again it is Mereu himself who claims in the cinema the natural space of a work that escapes the same rules of the algorithms that condition the visions and choices made by the platforms.
Bentu is the opposite of these, in short, as the author himself says not without self-irony, in the first fifteen minutes nothing happens in the film.
Or at least that's how it might seem to a superficial eye.
This is because Bentu is also an essay on waiting.
At the center of the story is Raffaele (Peppeddu Cuccu already in Bandits in Orgosolo) an elderly farmer who waits, alone in a farmhouse without even electricity, for the arrival of the wind of the title to be able to separate the grains of wheat from the ears.
There is practically nothing else in Mereu's film other than these two characters and the Sardinian countryside.
The yellow of the wheat and the blue of the sky dominate in an aesthetic and chromatic research that has led the crew to explore the countryside in search of places that had the right light for this literally blinding film where you can feel, in every image, the heat and the sweat, the parched earth and the smell of the night, the poverty of a farmhouse bricks and the ancient gestures of a simple plate of spaghetti cooked on the stove or bread and fresh ricotta.
Bentu is a film as harsh as the scenarios in which it is set.
An essential film in every way element that demonstrates, once again, that economic hardship, in the hands of those who know about cinema, can become aesthetic choices.
Confronting each other on the screen are not only two different ages of life but also two different conceptions of the world .
On the one hand, the ancient wisdom of millenary gestures, a stubborn refusal of that aberrant modernity represented by the monstrous thresher which at a certain point makes its appearance ready to devour the soil and rape nature.
From the another is a child who would like everything immediately with his impatience and his desire to devour the world.
As already in Assandira (http://www.euroroma.net/9345/ARTE%20E%20SPETTACOLO/assandira -a-film-deeply-rooted-in-the-Sardinian-cultural-tradition-capable-of-opening-up-to-a-universal-sight.html) Mereu returns to question the clash between tradition and modernity and again, starting from his profound rooted in his Sardinia, with very few means but with a clear idea of ​​cinema, he manages to broaden his gaze with a film that reflects on the great issues of our present; from our relationship with nature to the importance of knowing how to pass on traditions.
Knowing how to wait, this is what Mereu teaches us; whether it's the arrival of the wind or the right moment to get on a mare, otherwise nature itself will ask us to pay the bill.