FIORILE

In the car that takes them from Paris to Tuscany, the Benedetti children listen to their father Luigi tell them why, in the space of two centuries, the Benedettis have become the "Maledettis", the cursed ones.
It all began at the end of the 18th century, when Napoleon's troops passed through the region... During the occupation of Italy by Napoleon's troops, Elizabeth Benedetti falls in love with Jean, a French soldier, but her brother steals the gold he was guarding. From then on, the Benedetti family becomes powerful and rich, but cursed and hated.

Three stories, whose arrangement sometimes evokes that of the short stories in Kaos, the Taviani's previous masterpiece. But three stories with more obvious rhymes, three affairs of lucre and cowardice, of mad and unhappy love, of hopes for a better tomorrow and of misunderstandings. Three times, at the time of Bonaparte's armies, at the beginning of the cynical and puritanical century, and then in the last throes of defeated fascism, a child is born who will not know his father. The same performers return to embody these three variations, which are also stories in their own right, moving and sharp, sumptuously set in images and arpeggiated by two old accomplices of the filmmaker brothers, the cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci and the musician Nicola Piovani.
Jean-Michel Frodon, Le Monde