CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI’S Sparrow is imitation Luchino Visconti (perhaps a homage to The Leopard) and ersatz James Ivory, in particular A Room with a View, which it resembles on a number of occasions. Sparrow is undoubtedly expensive and opulent, but ultimately it emerges as no more than a dime-a-dozen Zeffirelli film. Here is a director who can make cholera look decorative, as dead bodies are thrown with pictorial flashiness into a flaming mass grave.
The whole film muddles the spiritual and the sensual. The convent bars are seen in opposition to the pool where the heroine has seen young men nakedly disporting themselves. The contrast between the heroine’s step- mother’s house, with its lush gardens and Mount Etna as a backdrop, and the barred convent is stressed over and over again. The emphasis falls on visual beauty rather than on meaningful content.
When Maria (Angela Bettis) is forced to leave the convent because of the threat of plague, she must undergo a test of faith and show her obedience to God’s will. Her belief in her spiritual destiny is shaken by the love she feels for Nino (Jonathan Schaech).
Some months later, she looks back at her home before returning to the convent, where she discovers that she loves her sin more than she loves God. The Sound of Music inevitably came to mind: how do the nuns at Catania solve a problem like Maria? Well, they do not sing, but this is a mixed blessing.
Giovanni Verga’s taut novel provides many opportunities for a film that could have been tragic and even moving. Instead, there is an alarming exchange of platitudes about life and the freedom to live. These include conventional sentiments about the need for renunciation; love as a flame that always burns in the heart; this world is not my world; and so on.
More important, the expedition to Etna, so central to the film’s action and meaning, misfires. Zeffirelli exploits all the pictorial possibilities, but when the red-hot lava that lays devastation in its wake is likened to the love shared by Maria and Nino, the lovers themselves are reduced to Mills and Boon, despite the director’s efforts to make us see them as a convent-crossed Romeo and Juliet.
The dubbed voices of some of the actors make it difficult to evaluate their performances. Bettis’ voice is infused with educated English tones and there is consequently a loss of intensity. The actors who are not dubbed come off best: Frank Finlay as the ogre-like Nunzio, John Castle as a bought husband, and Pat Heywood is particularly refreshing as an outspoken but devout nun who crosses herself whenever she is acerbic.
Sinead Cusack is suitably bitchy as Maria’s stepmother, and Vanessa Redgrave chooses to speak English with an Italian accent. Valentina Cortese has some effective moments, but as the Mother Superior she belongs more to aristocratic society than to the strict discipline of the Carmelites.
Ultimately, what Zeffirelli’s Sparrow lacks is the discipline of a true film-maker. Stunning visual designs are not enough.