Considered a masterpiece by many, this occasionally moving and exciting 1982 festival winner and arthouse hit tells the story of a group of civilians taking an ultimately violent stand against Italian and German fascists just prior to the allied liberation of Italy in 1944. Written and directed by Italy’s Taviani Brothers, “Night” is a late example of neorealism, a style that attempts to combine “fly on the wall” realism with flourishes of emotion. I’ve never cared for the style very much, but the problems that undo “The Night of the Shooting Stars” go well beyond my personal impatience with its genre. The main issue is that the film focuses almost equally on a large number of characters and, with a length of 103 minutes, there doesn’t seem to be enough time to get to know them well enough to care about what happens. Also, the story is recounted by a woman telling her children about some mostly very grown-up events that happened when she was six, most of which she could not have personally witnessed or understood at the time. In that case, you might expect some very non-realistic stylistic flourishes or displays of childlike imagination, but, with the exception of single brief fantasy sequence, it is all mostly presented in pretty but literal fashion. Curious viewers are probably better off starting with Robert Rosellini’s 1945 “Rome, Open City,” shot only months after the Nazis had left the city and the only purely neorealist film I’ve ever loved.
