‘Life Is Life’ Review: A True-Story Holdout Inspires An Amiable, Capra-Esque Italian Crowd-Pleaser

Inspired by the real-life case of a Sardinian shepherd who spent twenty years defending his land against a real estate company that wanted to build a sprawling resort on it, Life Is Life tells the story of Efisio Mulas (his real name was Ovidio). We meet him at the outset as a gruff, taciturn old man in a beautiful but impoverished corner of Sardinia, one of those classic (and somewhat stereotypical) figures of the real territory and of Italian cinema alike. Efisio (Giuseppe Ignazio Loi) speaks little, and only in dialect, but he is nobody’s fool. He grasps what’s going on right away when, in 1999, people start sounding him out about selling his property.

At least initially, though, the story is driven by his daughter Francesca (Virginia Raffaele), who is more or less charged with talking her father into selling the family home. The Milan-based development firm, run by a tycoon named Giacomo (Diego Abatantuono), has already bought up every parcel bordering Efisio’s. It only needs to win over the stubborn old man to complete its ambitious and controversial plan. The problem becomes especially thorny because the great majority of the townspeople are in favor of the «eco-resort,» mostly because work is scarce and everyone needs the tourists and, above all, the money they might bring. To persuade the old man, the company hires Mariano (Aldo Baglio), who will serve as site boss and chief negotiator with the obstinate farmer. His loud, bellowing arrival tips the film into a register even closer to classic Italian comedy, a tradition Riccardo Milani will draw on for nearly the rest of the story.

Through Mariano, Efisio is offered several hundred thousand lire (the dispute begins, in the fiction at least, before the arrival of the euro). It is more money than he has ever seen but he wants nothing to do with it. Nor with double the sum, or triple. From Milan, Giacomo and his team start looking at other options, and the first and most problematic is to send the townspeople themselves to his door to win him over with arguments rather than cash. Efisio welcomes and hears them out, but nobody sways him. That begins to turn him and his family into enemies of a town that wants progress at any cost, consequences be damned.

That is where the film’s curious center lies. The script plays with the image of a long line of people that never ends, with Efisio seated at the entrance to his house, preparing sun-dried tomatoes and listening to his neighbors year after year. Neither he nor the characters around him, except for the children who grow into teenagers, change much in appearance, but the world keeps moving and Efisio keeps doing his own thing. The euro arrives, millions are put on the table, construction begins to rise around him and hem him in, yet it’s fairly obvious from the very first offer that there’s no way he’ll budge. Frankly, one look at his face and his stance the moment the builders arrive makes it clear they’d have been better off changing locations or abandoning the project altogether.

From the title on, Life Is Life presents itself as a classic, traditional dramatic comedy, Italian nostalgia through and through. Its plot leans toward the sensitive, humanist portrait rather than toward drama or thriller, an approach that could well have been used to tell what is, at bottom, a story about the fight over land between big business and poor farmers. The film’s tools are the familiar ones for this kind of tale: folk music (played on modern instruments, but folk all the same), broad characterizations and stereotypes everywhere you look.

Milani isn’t interested in making a conventional political film, nor in pitting rich against poor, or North against South, in any brutal way. You can see it in the portrait of the Milanese businessman, who isn’t as cruel as he first appears, and in Mariano himself, who gradually warms to Efisio’s cause and, along the way, to his daughter. Though the setup is similar, Life Is Life is nothing like Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s real estate drama starring Sonia Braga. It is instead a nostalgic ode to the land and its traditions, one that leans on the conventions of the classic fable rather than on any neorealist or political rereading.

A commercial hit on its Italian release, where it grossed more than 6 million euros, Life Is Life is exactly what you’d expect from a film with that title. Its best moments belong to veteran Giuseppe Loi, a real shepherd from the area with no previous acting experience, whose Efisio lends the film a truthfulness that evaporates whenever the rest of the cast shows up and the tone turns overly soft and conventional. It’s a Frank Capra-style tale, in the vein of those popular humanist comedies of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, but one that rarely breaks out of a well-tested and somewhat worn-out formula. And its two-hour running time, especially given the repetitive narrative pattern it adopts, is excessive.

There is, admittedly, one interesting angle the film opens up but never fully explores. It has nothing to do with the fight between Efisio and the developers and everything to do with the division that opens up inside the town itself. Many of the arguments made by Efisio’s neighbors are valid and honestly felt. These are people with financial troubles who need the work the resort’s construction could provide, along with the economic injection that arriving tourists would bring. And it isn’t always easy to oppose that without offering an alternative. But Milani never digs deep into that debate (for that, I’d point readers to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist). He treats it instead as one more item to be checked off in the middle of an amiable comedy of manners.