Vittorio De Seta – Banditi a Orgosolo AKA Bandits of Orgosolo (1961)
Sardinian shepherds Michele, Peppeddu encounter bandits. Michele evades police, sheep perish. Wrongly charged with murder, impoverished, Michele turns outlaw. He resorts to violence, banditry for survival, fueling a lawless spiral.
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Admirably tough, bracingly atmospheric tale set among the starkly picturesque hilly interior of Sardinia. The life of men and animals is implicitly a function of this landscape – and so, too, is De Seta’s film (which must have been an absolute nightmare to shoot.) The story is Biblical in its simplicity – and its implacable harshness. A shepherd, tending his scraggly flock with his young brother for the purpose of cheese-making, becomes wanted by the thuggish local carabinieri after they mistakenly conclude he’s part of a murderous bandit gang. This proves to be only the start of the hapless shepherd’s woes as he suffers the vicissitudes of a particularly capricious Fate – a downward spiral which eventually reaches a stunningly bleak and piercingly ironic conclusion. Though we’re informed by the opening voiceover that the film is set in “the present” (i.e. 1959/1960), much of what we see could have taken place at any time over the past few centuries, the presence of guns and the carabinieri’s uniforms being the only noticeable “modern” detail during the rural sequences which make up the vast majority of the narrative. The shepherd does make brief visits to visit his family in the nearest town, an environment which sinister and alien to us, just as it does to the protagonist whose perspective we so closely come to share. Photographed in striking black and white, the film boasts utterly convincing performances – this despite the fact that all of the dialogue is (as was standard among Italian productions of the period) post-synched, while the sparingly-used score is deeply, suitably ominous in effect. Some viewers may take issue with what could be seen as the more melodramatic turns in the narrative, but it’s De Seta’s achievement to make even the most cruelly extreme circumstances seem entirely of a piece with the characters and their milieu.
Bandits.of.Orgosolo.1961.BDRIP.Radiance.4K.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 36 min
Size: 2.16 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 768x576
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 3 000 kb/s
BPP: 0.283
Audio
#1: Italian 1.0ch FLAC @ 215 kb/s
Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English
