Review of La Terra Trema (1949) by Anssi V — 29 Jan 2012

There are some parts in this film that work and some that do not. The overall story is not bad, following one family's struggle to break away from the norm and to become independent entrepreneurs. Plus, for being nonprofessional first timers, the actors are surprisingly decent, managing to portray the anguish and feelings of betrayal and suffering that their characters are going through.

Unfortunately the film isn't overly strong on the technical side. The film suffers from the classic pitfall of "show, don't tell", because most of the important scenes are narrated over and explained way too much in detail. In addition, the film just drags. I get that some film are supposed to be kind of slow, and in this case it would even be justified as the film tries to portray a fairly long stretch of time, but it doesn't remove the fact that some scenes just seem to go on forever. At some points I was even left pondering whether the film had just frozen altogether. Plus the sound design is terrible. Most of the background noise was either cacophonic, overly loud, unintelligible or all three at the same time.

Still, it's not a bad film. You can see that the director had great passion for his subject and, as I said, the actors are surprisingly talented, which manages to save the movie from being unwatchable. So, in the end, it's average.