Mereu's 'Wandering Trees' Stumbles on Fairy-Tale Tonal Clash
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- Salvatore Mereu directs 'Wandering Trees,' a three-hour film fusing fairy-tale structure with realistic Sardinian land traditions, though a tonal clash trips up his customary narrative mastery seen in prior works like 'Assandira' and 'Pretty Butterflies'
- Massimo Popolizio plays Sebastiano Nonne, whose 'monarcho-fascist sancta sanctorum' home full of taxidermied animals establishes him as the antagonist who forbids his sensitive book-hound son Emiliano (Lorenzo Urso) from befriending the Arca family
- Alessandro Haber plays Piero Arca, a contadino devoted to nurturing rescued animals with young Giuliano (Lupo Barbiero); the family is targeted by gunshots and verbal attacks for their symbiotic devotion to the land
- Romeo Perrone plays the older Giuliano, who returns home to find his animals massacred and his father gone, then journeys to a forest called 'The Children' where ragtag forest dwellers first tell him to leave, then, 'like a multitude of junior Calypsos,' don't want him to go
- Giulia Maenza plays Maddalena, the storybook-princess daughter whose spontaneous nature contrasts with her rigid, rulebound military boyfriend Michelangelo (Lorenzo Richelmy), Sebastiano's older soldier son
- Alberto Capitta wrote the source novel and co-wrote the screenplay; the reviewer faults both for 'screamingly obvious' elements like stuffed buzzards in the Nonne house and the unexplained role of Maddalena's two sisters, noting the point of adaptations is to make them work on screen
- Francesco Piras (DP) is credited with lighting the film 'to perfection' and staying in 'perfect synch with the director's reverence for the natural world,' emerging as the technical saving grace of a film whose 'wandering narrative needs deeper roots'
Why it matters: The review lands a notable reversal on a director long admired as an outlier in Italian cinema for his near-mystical treatment of Sardinian rural life — suggesting that importing fairy-tale conventions into that register exposes structural weaknesses neither Capitta's source novel nor Mereu's script could disguise. For Mereu's filmography, the three-hour runtime and reliance on 'most recognizable' literary touchstones (Leopardi's 'L'Infinito') marks a departure from the narrative experimentation that defined his earlier triumphs.
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