I will not summarize the plot both because you can look it up but also because it has no narrative thrust and if I were to try, I would say something like "the seasons change on a northern Italian farm at the end of the 19th century, where four poor families live in close proximity." Slowly, personalities and hints of different characters' biographies emerge, but the struggle against but with the earth and a demanding landlord to make enough money to eat overrides all else. You witness the details of all this work, the scrubbing of clothes, the slash of the knife against a pig's carcass, the deliberate effort put into heaving a sack of corn. Joy comes in small moments: a finger presses a well-tended seedling into the soil; a child learns to read; someone finds a gold coin and laughs to himself with glee. I like movies about people working and living their everyday lives because made well, they gesture towards certain profundities that more exciting movies skip over. Art rarely acknowledges that we all spend most of our lives in routine work and that as a result, our lives just aren't that interesting. The Tree of Wooden Clogs points to the possibility of beauty in labor, if not necessarily to any greater meaning*. Time passes, the earth moves on its axis, plants die and grow again, and we survive through constant individual and, critically, collective effort. After a woman gives birth at home, the neighbors who came to assist in the stead of a pricey doctor shrug off her thanks, because of course they came to help.
At the time it came out, leftist critics pointed that The Tree of Wooden Clogs takes place during a time of social upheaval but its tenant farmer subjects remain bent under their landlord's yoke.The film repeatedly alludes to protests and rebellions happening elsewhere, but at a key moment toward its end when, in a different movie, they might have risen up and resisted, they stand by silently. I find tremendous power in these scenes because they refuse a viewer the opportunity to identify with a hero. The average people--like these farmers, like most of us in our time--are scared and desperate to cling to what little they have. Olmi sees that we must tell these stories, too, not just those of the brave exceptions. How else do we understand what's at stake, what we're asking ourselves and others to sacrifice to improve our collective lot? How do we judge people who, in such a moment, opt to take care of themselves and their families? It's crushing but tinged with hope for a better future, like life.
*Olmi was religious and the film is steeped in Catholicism. There is, perhaps, a tiny miracle, and characters are really just constantly saying the rosary. I think for him, some meaning-in-the-mundane comes in bearing witness to god's creation. Obviously I cannot endorse this sentiment, and like its contemporary leftist critics, read exploitation in some characters' relationship to the church that I don't think he intended. At the same time, there's something sad and moving about seeing people have faith in anything at all, even if it's just in something that was once basic but today is seemingly unstable ie. the changing seasons.
** Some aspects about this movie--the expansive focus on a community that narrows down to family-sized, the constancy of work, tiny dramas of the mundane, a gaggle of cute yelling children--remind me a lot of the similarly perfect "Killer of Sheep," which oddly came out the same year.
