“Do you think this place would be as special if it was more easily accessible?” Grace says to her friend Izabel, shortly after arriving in the Italian hideaway of Cinque Terre in “The Siege of Paradise,” surrounded by water and largely free of cars as a result. Izabel believes that it’s the difficulty reaching the place that has made it all the more appealing to tourists, who are said to outnumber the 4500 year-around residents of the town by about three million that pass through each summer, but Grace, an influencer, clearly feels differently as she invites all her Instagram followers to join her on the beach, at least virtually before giving thought to making the trek themselves.
For the locals in Cinque Terre, Gar O’Rourke’s exceptionally sharp portrait of a community in flux may end up being a double-edged sword, perhaps being no better advertisement than to come visit when all its natural charms are on display from the pastel painted hillside homes at the edge of the water and cobblestone roads to amazing looking food and wine while acknowledging a pressing concern for communities like it where the economy has largely turned over entirely to welcoming tourism rather than keep things hospitable for its longtime denizens. As Mayor Fabrizia Pecunia, who ran for office out of a desire to keep her calm morning routine of walking her dog and grabbing a coffee without having to walk through crowds, reports, the population is diminishing as the elderly pass away and their homes are left to become AirBNB rentals and most businesses may be enjoying greater profits, but exhaustion has set in when the town was never designed to accommodate as many people as are now descending on it.
Although it takes place over one summer, O’Rourke and editor John Murphy shrewdly structure the film as if it were unfolding over one day to go by light, creating the feeling of an endless summer when the sun doesn’t go down until the end and the start of the season mirrors that of the day where locals can quietly go about their business. The film opens with Lise and her husband Bartolomeo debating what day of the week it actually even is when there wouldn’t seem to be much use for time in their idyllic existence, tending to a vineyard where they can depend on the ripening of grapes to know the seasons have changed, but soon enough O’Rourke is onboard a boat where the shot of the back of a captain approaching shore with a boatload of vacationers can look like the shark in “Jaws.”
There’s a wonderful sense of humor ingrained into Lukas Gut’s highly saturated cinematography where the colors pop and even a postcard stand is packed with personality in how the camera slides down to capture each individual postcard, but while the rest of the rest of the film doesn’t argue too much with the image being projected to the rest of the world, O’Rourke is able to express the toll it’s taking to keep up appearances as a restauranteur who inherited the premier kitchen in town from his mother would like to pass it onto his 21-year-old daughter out of tradition perhaps but also it appears some fatigue with his changing customer base, and a fisherman who has turned his back completely on the tourist industry when he feels it’s become incumbent for him to save the practice of sustaining the local catch for residents when he only has six or seven colleagues, down from the hundreds he can remember at the turn of the century.
Local residents can still speak freely since most around can’t understand a word of Italian, depriving them of hearing the elders complaining “All these fucking people” as the streets are filled and seemingly festive and the film has that rarest quality where it can be thoroughly enjoyed as an excursion to parts unknown by an outsider and surely hits home for those that have grown up in Cinque Terre and dread what it’s become. In a world where experiences have become increasingly reduced to what can be transmitted over a phone, “The Siege of Paradise” takes a far larger view, offering a full experience of a picturesque locale where all that foot traffic has the capacity to trample over what’s special.
“The Siege of Paradise” will screen again at Tribeca on June 9th at AMC 19th St. East 6 at 8:45 pm. It will next screen at DC/DOX in Washington, DC on June 12th at 3 pm at the Regal Gallery Place.