Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2014

[Chris Knipp]

ALBERTO FASULO: TIR (2013)



The voluntary servitude of relatively good money in a pan-European market

The hardworking, sincere Italian filmmaker Albert Fasulo's debut feature, which some have called "neo-neorealism," is a docudrama using actors in authentic found settings to present socio-economic reportage in dramatic form. In Tir the settings are not glamorous, though they provide the glamor, or shock, of the authentic. The protagonist, Bronko (Bronko Zavrsan of No Man's Land), drives a "tir" or big rig tractor trailer all over western Europe. His Italian employers constantly push him and his coworkers to give up sleep time and add to driving time to make deadlines and satisfy clients. Bronko, like his co-driver Maki (Marijan Sestak), with whom he is working at first, is a composite based on Fasulo's three-plus years of research accompanying many different drivers on their trips. Fasulo chose a Croatian rather than Italian lead because today the majority of these drivers are Eastern European. Bronko is a former schoolteacher who drives big rigs for an Italian shipping company all ll around western Europe. He accepts being cut off from his family for lengthy periods because this way he can earn around $2,00 a month, three or four times what a teacher gets at home, besides which, his teaching job was not secure.

The director also operated the camera, living in the truck with Zavrsan for most of the four months during which he shot the film. Zavrsan likewise is living the experience he is performing. In today's Italian cinematic scene of glossy, feel-good films, Fasulo's authenticity created such an impression that Tir won the top prize at its debut in the Rome Film Festival in November 2013. There is something tonic and fresh, in an Italian context, anyway, about a movie that doesn't go for glitz or entertainment. But it's only fair to add, as Jay Weissberg of Variety wrote from Rome, that while Tir is "solid" and "intermittently engrossing," it's "rarely vital," and it does "perhaps too good a job of showing the boredom of the long haul."

Tir is even more monotonous, or at least harsher, than the much admired little Latin American truck-travel docudrama Las Acacias (ND/NF 2012), Pablo Giorgelli's closely observational film set in a vehicle loaded with lumber that's driven all across Argentina. From start to finish of Giogelli's film the driver has a hitchhiker, a young woman with a cute little baby in tow. Contact between the two adults is shy and reserved, but there's a kind of sweet romantic pull. Fasulo is dealing with a more widespread and specific phenomenon. Bronko is driving a big rig that's like many others, one equipped with modern electronic maps and a device for drivers to clock in and out, among other things, an essential transport vehicle that's part of a network of networks in which the driver is only a pawn in the game, though an essential one. Most of the time Bronko is alone, if connected to home by cell phone, so far less cut off than a nineteenth-century indentured sailor spending two years before the mast, but still in a sense trapped in limbo. When Bronko and Maki are together then share meals by the side of the truck and talk. Maki wants to quit as soon as he can. Broko gets calls from his wife Isa (Lucka Pockaj that are annoying, even maddening at times. She leads him to believe the mechanic that fixed her car's lights went out drinking and dancing with her and a friend and they were tempted to do more. Another time Isa calls saying a temporary teaching job has come up for him, but he must annoy her by rejecting it, because the money and security won't be sufficient, though he is choosing a longly life thousands of kilometers from home over being with his family working at a quiet, civilized job in his own native land. Later Bronko agrees grudgingly to let his grown son have a large block of his savings for the down payment on an apartment in town. His wife calls soon after, furious after learning about this and insisting the savings are her and Bronko's retirement account. Bronko is helpless as these conversations wash over him, so numbed by the long tiring drives at times he barely knows what day it is.

Sometimes the load and even the truck can be switched by the company at the last minute, most tellingly, near the film's end, going from earlier potatoes and apples to a truck full of live pigs, a burden Bronko does not know how to deal with. The driver of the pig truck has just gotten fed up and bailed from his job. Bronko has to fill in and save the pigs. Patience is required to watch all this. Fasulo cunningly edits to convey the sense of a good long stretch of real time. But imagine the patience required of these drivers. Fasulo's film may be slight, if original seen in an Italian context; but as a contribution to a cinema of social and economic issues, it has a place.

Tir, 90 mins., debuted at Rome, with the prize mentioned; also played at Belfort and Vilnius. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center 7 June 2014. At the Lincoln Center Q&A Fasulo reported that Zarvan not only got his trucker's license for this role but was officially hired for by the trucking firm, which commended him on the thoroughness of his preparation. This makes the performance and the shoot scrupulously true-to-life, as well as informed by Fasulo's years of research. In this case as Weissberg suggests, the Rome prize is as much for the ideas and information the film conveys and its authenticity as for the film itself.