Burning Hearts * * * ½

 Here is another film which is part of the current Italian Film Festival.  It's not exactly fun viewing, but it's worth the effort.   Apparently in Italy the film is called "I'll Eat Your Heart".  I don't know why it's been renamed, I think the original is more fitting.

Let's do some killing...Prego.

It might be hard to portray Sicily as ugly, but director Pipo Mezzapesa does so quite successfully with his black and white cinematography of filthy unkempt farms and people living bloody, brutal vengeful lives: With their unwashed appearance, dirty clothes and beaten up old cars clearly the rewards of being in the mafia are not great.  It makes you wonder why they bother.  Might as well just run the farm.

It's shown as a bit of a Romeo and Juliet story with two rival families always at war.  Marilena from the Camporeale family is a beautiful woman who is a kind of widow, in that her husband has been sent to jail for a long, long time.  Andrea  from the Malatesta family gets the hots for her and soon they are seeing each other for secret sexy liaisons down by the salt flats. 

Andrea's dad finds out and and tells him to knock it off: "Keep away from that girl", but the other family have already found out.  It's all too late and soon the two families are shooting bullets at each other on a regular basis and Andrea's Dad dies. 

Andreas is now the head of the family.  Shades of The Godfather as a nice young man turns into a monster. He openly takes Marilena as his lover and she is separated from her children and moves into his farm where she is coldly received by Andrea's mad mother who can think of nothing but bloody revenge and encourages her sons to go forth and reek it.

A third family tries to broker peace but there is something rather opportunistic about them too.

I guess the black and white photography gave it more of a menacing feeling and perhaps saved us from the shock of the spilt blood but it also gives the film an air of oppression. It's a good film; a well told story; but personally I got weary of wallowing in all this filth after the first hour.