Bentu

Film - 2022

34.4K

Bentu it's a movie with Peppeddu Cuccu, Giovanni Porcu Full cast. Directed by Salvatore Mereu. Original title Bentu, runtime 70 minutes. Genre Drama.

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Review of

Emiliano Baglio

BentuA 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 Antonio Cossu's novel on which the film is based. However, it is difficult to imagine a different treatment and result. Even the choice to bring Bentu to face the public in cinemas, after the invitation to Authors' Days 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, nothing happens in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Or at least that's what it might seem to some 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 Banditi a 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. Every now and then his solitude is broken by the visits of his nephew Angelino (Giovanni Porcu) who helps him, keeps him company, represents the only link with the rest of the world and his wife and above all he is impatient to be able to ride Raffaele's mare. 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 led the crew to Read all

plot

Raffaele has just assembled his little pile of grain, which serves as his provisions for an entire year. Not wishing to get caught unprepared, he has been sleeping in the countryside for days, far from everybody, waiting for the wind to arrive and help him at last to separate the wheat-grains from the chaff. But the wind will not show up. Only Angelino comes to visit him every day, making him feel less lonely. Maybe one day, when he is all grown up, Raffaele will lend him his indomitable mare and he will finally manage to ride her. But Angelino has no intention of waiting.