There's no shortage of whimsy, enchantment or madness in this quartet of stories from backwoods Sicily, adapted from the writings of Luigi Pirandello. In the first a troubled old woman recounts a painful episode from her past and explains why she can no longer face her only honest son; the second tells of a newly married husband afflicted with insane, bestial longings each month during the full moon; a hunchbacked handyman in another story mends a large terracotta jar using a magic adhesive, only to find himself unable to climb out from inside it. There's no unifying thread between each segment besides an obvious love of folk tales and filmmaking, and the lack of any consistent narrative focus can make the three-plus hour running time a major test of stamina. The final story is by far the weakest, but the dreamlike epilogue, with Pirandello himself recalling a long lost childhood memory, is worth the challenge. The film was shot (in lovely rustic earth tones) on location in Sicily.
