The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Director: Ermanno Olmi
Year Released: 1978
Rating: 2.5
It works ... and yet it doesn't: Olmi's film, more documentary than fiction, details the various events on a communal farm, where everyone works very hard together, growing tomatoes and trying to live in harmony with nature. For being a 3+ hour 'epic,' the society presented is closed and stagnant - Olmi's 'utopia' is something of a nightmare, despite the implied purity - and I kept watching even though I was never all that interested in the events taking place, stuck between interest and indifference, forever shifting from one to the other. How it rests in my memory will allow me to decide if it's genuinely good or not worth the bother.
