Movie Blog MSPIFF Spotlight: 'The Man Who Will Come'

By Eric Henderson, WCCO

The WWII pictorial drama is probably going to forever be a staple of European cinema. Instead of the Cinema Paradiso school, call it Cinema Inferno.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a number of these movies point out, the worst thing that could happen would be for anyone to forget the atrocities of WWII, thereby laying the groundwork for them to be repeated.

That said, since many of these horrors not only have been repeated, but are actually continuing to happen all around the world today, the "lessons" of these types of movies often get overshadowed by the theatrics, the cinematography, the wholesomeness of the experience. They're history lessons that make you want to reach for a pair of 3-D glasses.

Italian director Giorgio Diritti's melodrama The Man Who Will Come tells of the massacre of an entire village (a la Spike Lee's messy Miracle of St. Anna) through the eyes of a young girl who has been mute since her brother was killed. She is excited for the impending birth of her new brother, but then the Third Reich goes and rains on her parade.

The movie is as solid as one could hope, and indeed has an almost bottomless arsenal of:

a) rolling hills,
b) pleasant peasants, and
d) Nazi atrocities

But the entire proceedings seem calculatedly orchestrated with at least one eye, if not both, on the Kodak Theater stage where Oscar hands out its trophy for best foreign film. This is filmmaking at its most careful. (Theater 1, 9:45 p.m.)

-------

-------

All shows are playing at the St. Anthony Main Theatre. For the complete festival schedule, click here. An alphabetical listing of all the movies being shown can be found here. Ticket information is here.