Converted farm “Even children never play shepherds,” says Costantino, the old owner of Assandira, a farm in Sardinia. What's so funny about working as a shepherd? Dress him up in traditional clothes, extracted from past centuries, give him a gun to protect the herd and invite citizens from some Germany or Denmark to look at all this. And even then this image of a stern man, from the school bench at the behest of his elders, who connected his fate with sheep and pigs, will not seem to you enough to entertain the mind and eyes.
But Mario, the son of Costantino, is ready to portray the shepherd properly, although he is the same citizen from Germany. Precisely because he is a citizen, his shepherd is a desirable shepherd, a shepherd who milks the sheep with a pleasure quickly captured by the hearts of tourists and drawn them further. On the lawn, where the stallion and the bride-horse are brought. At a feast. And deeper...
The director compares the structure of the film with a doll, when the knowledge of reality opens to you gradually, in several stages. The games of Greta’s son and daughter-in-law are also opened by Costantino. Let's play shepherd - he protects the lives of the weak from predators. Let's play a syringe, it brings life. Let's play the horse wedding... Wait, Costantino says for the first time. "Do you want her to shed all her seed?" What do you know? - The people are just playing. Let’s play in... something that the director hints at in an interview with Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Stop, says Costantino definitively.
The biblical image of the shepherd, the keeper of lives, suddenly transforms an old man who does not understand the youth into Wisdom itself. Did the child, whose eyes were wide closed, understand what was going on? The child heard all this, and don’t say you didn’t hear it! The sounds of all these people not distinguishing sheep from goats and man from beast. Those who trampled the gift of distinction, corrected the commandment of naming names.
“But our program for today is over,” the tourist says confusedly, addressing Greta, for whom the game has just been paused. The game with Life doesn’t end when you want to. Because you do not own lives, but the Shepherd of Heaven. Who shuts the door and no one will open it.
10 out of 10
Original