poetcomic1 I adore a hundred scenes from this film and it captures the rhythms and sorrows of the Italian peasants who no longer owned their own land but were virtual serfs. Till the ending I would have given this10 stars easily. The detailed and loving and closely observed world of the film is a treasure in itself. The color is soft, subtle and dreamy. The no-actors are jaw-droppingly good. (Spoiler alert) Now the classic peasant is if anything resourceful, sparing and wastes nothing. So my credulity goes OUT the window when the father cuts down an entire tree to make one wooden shoe for his son so that his son can go to school AND that tree is one of a very long avenue of venerable, trained and neatly spaced trees belonging to the landowner and that entire landscape of trees is ruined by the destruction of one tree my next thought after the waste of an entire tree is that the peasant is insensitive to the simple harmony of the regularly spaced avenue of trees that is part of his own life as well. I am being kind giving this eight stars out of ten. When a poor peasant and his family are thrown out of their homes and I, in the audience are cheering their departure - the filmmaker has screwed up his message.

lasttimeisaw A Palme d'Or recipient for Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi for his humanist depiction of the agrarian life in Bergamo, Lombardy, near the turn of the 20th century, THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, is a 3-hour essayist pastoral only betrays its political agency in the downbeat coda. Four households living in a farmhouse and their quotidian tenor of lives are peeped through Olmi's perceptive but dispassionate lens, a pseudo-documentary employing non-actors to uphold the performance as natural as possible (resultantly, reduction of expression is its knock-on effect), perfectly re-enacts a verisimilitude of reality regarding his parents' generation concretely imprinted in Olmi's mind.The families are all sharecroppers and don't own an inch of the land where they are toiling, and receive meager income from the landlord predicated on the productivity. To today's eyes, the film's nostalgic atmosphere (copiously purveyed by organist Fernando Germani's lyrical rendering of Bach's oeuvre), authentic loci and primitive means of life are quite at a remove, but what matters the most (and strikes home) is Olmi's unqualified benevolence towards his subjects, his utmost reverence to humanity flickering through the successive occurrences at once trivial and vital, temporal and sacred, a high note arrives in the pig-butchering sequence where that poor critter's wail reverberates in viewer's head long after its life force is severed, we are forced to see something unsavory on which we are all inclined to turn a blind eye.Piety, is ensconced in the forefront here, the film opens with a scene in church, where a priest persuades an illiterate peasant that his son is smart enough to go to a proper school (at a time when basic education is still a privilege); a widow with six children is granted with a "miracle" when her livestock is given a death warrant from the vet; a pair of newlyweds gets married in the church on an early morning, visits a convent later and brings back to home a foundling, this segment temporarily dislocates us from the parochial milieu and offers a glance of a bigger picture (commotion and conflicts are hinted), however transient it is. But conspicuously the film has less ambition in highlighting human follies, a country fair is presented, an episode of an inane farmer hiding a golden coin inside a horse's hoof is the closest thing we can get. A revered ethnographic infotainment permeated with bucolic sublimity, THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS - its title referring to the occasion of the harsh punishment received by one of the households in the end, has its own incontrovertible artistic integrity and a rarefied stature matched by few peers, but there is a smattering of monotony and inflexibility is extruded out of its unyielding aesthetic tenet, which may have done a disservice to itself, not least considering its epic length.

Hitchcockyan In true neo-realistic vein THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS follows the lives of a quartet of peasant families striving for daily existence in turn of the century Italy. There's no conventional plot here but a series of ritualistic vignettes that flawlessly capture their strenuous survival over a course of a year. A grandfather demonstrates and passes the secrets behind his early tomatoes, a bright five year old trudges miles to attend school wearing a pair of clogs, a devout widow with six children prays for their ailing livestock, a young couple's restrained courtship and subsequent marriage, a pregnant mother foregoes the services of a midwife to save for warm clothing. All these threads are expertly interwoven and are blended with a sense of humanity and poetic optimism.Couple of movies that instantly spring to mind which succeeded in capturing the monotony emanating from its character(s) this arrestingly are - JEANNE DIELMAN (which was a brilliant character study within the contemporary setting) & THE NAKED ISLAND (another ruminative dissection of a farming family boasting stunning imagery). TTOWC on the other hand is more epic in scale and works like a gritty documentary featuring non-actors. There are couple of gruesome sequences of a hog being disemboweled and of a goose-beheading which purely serve to highlight the harsh realities of peasant life. TTOWC is also relatively more interactive while the above two were virtually dialogue-less.I'd only seen Olmi's IL POSTO before this - which was an indelibly honest coming of age film. And considering the fact that he wrote, directed, shot and edited this meditative epic - speaks volumes of cinematic acuity. He had that unique ability of making the mundane almost miraculous.

anna-k-2 Yes, it lasts three hours. Yes, it is about a village community where nothing much happens. Not your typical man save-woman blow-up joint scenario, definitely. All this is said on the package, therefore I truly do not understand people who criticise this film for slowness. OF COURSE it is going to be slow, what do you expect? After this private note, some review. The film is excellent and highly recommendable for many reasons. First of all, the shooting: the use of non-professional actors,authentic settings and a real-life focus makes this film feel like a documentary, although it is set over a hundred years in the past. It therefore gives an unprecedented opportunity to peek into the life of rural Lombardy at the turn of the centuries. Secondly, the plot. Slow as it is, it sucks you in nonetheless, as you get emotionally involved with the beautifully depicted community of families. Full of small and big dramas, the film does not cease to surprise till the very end. Finally, perhaps the biggest asset of the movie is the loving, but realistic depiction of the times. There is dirt, hard work and cow dung, but there is also nature, family, and most importantly - love. If you speak some Italian, the additional perk is the beautiful dialect. Highly, highly recommend!