Anita (Nora Stassi) is seventeen. She has already lost her mother and now her father Jacopo (Luciano Curreli) is suffering from leukemia and would need a transplant. None of her family members are compatible with her except perhaps her brother Gaetano (Michele Atzori). However, Jacopo and Gaetano have not spoken to each other for years.
Let's put our hands forward, The Lamb, Mario Piredda's first work, has some of the typical defects of his early works; first of all the anxiety of wanting to say everything and perhaps even too much.
In other words, a vigorous snipping would have benefited the film a lot which, from a certain point onwards, begins to get lost and drag on almost as if the director did not have the courage to leave his characters and felt the need to tell us this story to the end even if this is not strictly necessary.
So much so that when it comes to closing the film we find ourselves faced with an ending sincerely incomprehensible which perhaps is intended to be metaphorical but whose meaning escapes (at least to us).
Yet, just as the film overflows in a pleonastic way here comes one of those flashes that illuminates it.
Let's talk about the scene in which Gaetano dances in a squalid bar inhabited by unforgettable masks, authentic, raw yet surreal faces.
An almost dreamlike scene yet at the same time full of raw realism which underlines the profound loneliness of the characters in this story.
A solitude and a condition of marginality to which the Sardinian landscape, harsh and windswept, seems to respond; made of snow-capped mountains and stones.
Sardinia itself seems to be the beating heart of this work, as underlined by the scene in which Anita breaks the carasau bread and points out to her grandfather that every piece resembles the shape of the island.
The condition of the characters, essentially the defeated, the marginalized including a sick person, a girl marked by life and an ex-addict, almost seems to become a symbol of an entire land, arid, hard, harsh and angular.< br />Perhaps The lamb would even be an indictment of the military servitude to which the island was subjected.
The army and the military lands forbidden to civilians are omnipresent in the film and are continually perceived as a foreign entity capable only of subjugating the local population.
Piredda goes even further by suggesting that Anita's parents may have become ill precisely because of the military experiments, with a clear reference at the Salto del Quirra shooting range.
Alongside these suggestions the director constructs the most classic of coming-of-age stories, well summed up by the metaphor of the sick lamb which, taken into care by Anita, will manage to heal and grow; thus following the girl's destiny.
However, in addition to the ability to film the landscape, elevating it to the co-protagonist of the film and in addition to some excellent sequences, what is most surprising in the film are on the one hand the ability to direct the actors, all excellent and above all the discussion on the family which is at the center of the work.
It is an extended family in which the impossible love between Jacopo and a patient like him, the bond between grandfather and grandson or finally Anita's friend, all united by a deep affection and sharing of pain.
At the center are Anita and her father Jacopo whose relationship is one of the most tender and intense seen on Italian screens in recent years.
Piredda manages to fully restore the profound love and complicity that binds them and which explodes in sequences such as the one in which Anita plays with her father in a wheelchair.
This beating heart full of joy seems to us be the deepest soul of a film that once again confirms Sardinian cinema as one of the most interesting and vital in our country.
Let's put our hands forward, The Lamb, Mario Piredda's first work, has some of the typical defects of his early works; first of all the anxiety of wanting to say everything and perhaps even too much.
In other words, a vigorous snipping would have benefited the film a lot which, from a certain point onwards, begins to get lost and drag on almost as if the director did not have the courage to leave his characters and felt the need to tell us this story to the end even if this is not strictly necessary.
So much so that when it comes to closing the film we find ourselves faced with an ending sincerely incomprehensible which perhaps is intended to be metaphorical but whose meaning escapes (at least to us).
Yet, just as the film overflows in a pleonastic way here comes one of those flashes that illuminates it.
Let's talk about the scene in which Gaetano dances in a squalid bar inhabited by unforgettable masks, authentic, raw yet surreal faces.
An almost dreamlike scene yet at the same time full of raw realism which underlines the profound loneliness of the characters in this story.
A solitude and a condition of marginality to which the Sardinian landscape, harsh and windswept, seems to respond; made of snow-capped mountains and stones.
Sardinia itself seems to be the beating heart of this work, as underlined by the scene in which Anita breaks the carasau bread and points out to her grandfather that every piece resembles the shape of the island.
The condition of the characters, essentially the defeated, the marginalized including a sick person, a girl marked by life and an ex-addict, almost seems to become a symbol of an entire land, arid, hard, harsh and angular.< br />Perhaps The lamb would even be an indictment of the military servitude to which the island was subjected.
The army and the military lands forbidden to civilians are omnipresent in the film and are continually perceived as a foreign entity capable only of subjugating the local population.
Piredda goes even further by suggesting that Anita's parents may have become ill precisely because of the military experiments, with a clear reference at the Salto del Quirra shooting range.
Alongside these suggestions the director constructs the most classic of coming-of-age stories, well summed up by the metaphor of the sick lamb which, taken into care by Anita, will manage to heal and grow; thus following the girl's destiny.
However, in addition to the ability to film the landscape, elevating it to the co-protagonist of the film and in addition to some excellent sequences, what is most surprising in the film are on the one hand the ability to direct the actors, all excellent and above all the discussion on the family which is at the center of the work.
It is an extended family in which the impossible love between Jacopo and a patient like him, the bond between grandfather and grandson or finally Anita's friend, all united by a deep affection and sharing of pain.
At the center are Anita and her father Jacopo whose relationship is one of the most tender and intense seen on Italian screens in recent years.
Piredda manages to fully restore the profound love and complicity that binds them and which explodes in sequences such as the one in which Anita plays with her father in a wheelchair.
This beating heart full of joy seems to us be the deepest soul of a film that once again confirms Sardinian cinema as one of the most interesting and vital in our country.
