A sea of strangeness

Emanuele Crialese's Respiro, set on the island in the present day, suggests that any tourist foolish enough to set foot on the quayside will be greeted with gang violence, streets smeared with canine blood, and a smack in the mouth from a hairy fisherman.

The central pleasure of Crialese's film is his presentation of scenes and events that might be time-honoured customs of Lampedusan culture observed with a documentarist's keen eye, or just some weird stuff quarried from his imagination.

We meet a man who owns a hillside bunker inside which dogs are penned like battery hens. We are presented with a quirk of the local economy, whereby fishermen supply unwanted sardines to boys swimming in the harbour, who pluck the fish from the water and exchange them on shore for raffle tickets.

We are invited to believe that anyone male and under 16 on the island is engaged in a vicious internecine war in which the defeated combatants go home bleeding and trouserless.

Crialese is particularly good at this Lord of the Flies shtick. His Lampedusan boys are wild creatures who prey on the island's animal population, and on each other. The members of one gang catch sparrows in little traps baited with fat white grubs and happily kebab the birds until they are offered better sport - jumping three rivals, stripping them naked and pelting them with rocks. This faction gets its revenge by waiting for its tormentors to dive for seaurchins and then shredding the back of one unfortunate boy by grinding him into a heap of spiny creatures.

Crialese tries less hard with his central character, Grazia (Valeria Golino), a fish-gutter and mother-ofthree who seems to be suffering from some form of mental illness. All the usual characteristics of female madness, established over time by films such as The Snake Pit, A Woman Under the Influence and The Hours, are acknowledged.

Grazia smashes crockery, suffers violent fits that can only be dissipated by the contents of a fearsome syringe, embarrasses her husband in front of his friends, seems unable to control her sexual urges, takes off her bra in public, and develops an affinity with water (in the cinema, madwomen and the sea go together like toffee popcorn and sticky carpets).

The biggest cliché of all, however, is that Grazia is probably not mad: it is only the beery, boysy, conservative culture of her home that makes her appear so. It is a conventional notion marooned in the middle of a sea of strangeness.