CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI Movie Review

Eboli
Cristo si e fermato a Eboli

In 1935, at the start of the Abyssinian War, Italian artist, writer, and physician Carlo Levi was banished to a small village in southern Italy due to his unwavering opposition to fascism. It was an extraordinary and life-changing year that Levi spent in exile, though he would only write about the experience years later—while living in Florence during World War II—in what would become his acclaimed 1943 memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli. In 1979, filmmaker Francesco Rosi completed a two-and-a-half hour film adaptation of Levi's book, with Gian Maria Volonté in the role of the author. Astoundingly, and against the odds for successful non-fawning screen biographies of this sort, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli is an epic in every sense; an enriching, un-sentimentalized journey of fear, hope, and self-discovery that never loses its human-scaled focus despite its grand scale. The gradual and novelistic way in which Rosi immerses the audience in Levi's story was apparently lost on the film's American distributor, which released it here with more than half-an-hour removed, changing the title simply to Eboli, lest the public think they were seeing a religious picture. (The title is a reference to Levi's description of the impoverished village of Basilicata: “Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history.”) Fortunately, the full version of Christ Stopped at Eboli was eventually made available here, allowing one of Rosi's masterworks—as well as Volonté's most exquisitely etched performance—to be seen in its full splendor. With Lea Massari and Irene Papas.

NEXT STOP … The Moment of Truth, Three Brothers, II Postino

1979 118m/C IT FR Gian Marie Volonte, Irene Papas, Paolo Bonacelli, Francois Simon, Alain Cuny, Lea Massari; D: Francesco Rosi; W: Francesco Rosi; C: Pasquale De Santis. British Academy Awards '82: Best Foreign Film. VHS COL