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BY PETER KEOUGH
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Grazia (Valeria Golino), the free-spirited, possibly bipolar wife of island fisherman Pietro (Vincenzo Amato) is a woman under the influence of overwrought neorealism. Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro is a beautifully photographed, pseudo-mythic soap opera that is the equivalent of exiling Cassavetes’s beleaguered heroine to Rossellini’s Stromboli. While Grazia’s teenaged son Pasquale (Francesco Casisa) is bemused, if bewildered, by her impulses to swim topless at the beach or jump on board a stranger’s pleasure boat, her husband, extended family, and most of the island community agree that she should be sent to a specialist in Milan. So Respiro turns out to be a contrived fable of the conflict between freedom and social repression, with a few heavy-handed metaphors tossed in. Which is a shame, because the faces of Crialese’s cast are fascinating in themselves, and the island of Lampedusa on which the film is shot is a sun-blasted showcase of the stark, the surreal, and the sublime. They deserve better than to be reduced to sophomoric symbolism.
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