Old and young Taviani’s declaration of love for Sicily has never before been so sarcastic and caustic, filled with a loss of time and real art.
The film is divided into two parts. The first half is made in black and white colors, telling the history of Italy in the mid-30s of the last century. In the center of the plot is a dying writer Luigi Pirandello, who experiences a longing for his children and successive generations before his death. In his will, he asks to burn his body and scatter his ashes in his home village in Sicily. Here begins the tragicomic bureaucratic and human fuss.
Using Pirandello’s axiom that unhappy people become overly superstitious, Taviani begins the story of the adventures of a crate of ashes in Italy. The prejudices of the Sicilians not to fly together on the same plane with the ashes also mislead the American pilot. No matter how the Italians of that time thought about the liberators from America, prejudices are transmitted to any nationality. In the train carriage, travelers find no better use for the box than for playing cards. Upon arrival in their native lands, the local church finds only a children's coffin for a memorial service. Residents take him for the funeral of a dwarf. The ignorance of three generations, namely the children of their parents and old men, is reduced to the absolute.
Many years have passed since the will of the writer was poorly executed. In the second half, the picture acquires a bright color palette. In the film, there are many very similar locations to those in Chaos for the director. A high slope above the water, where the writer’s ashes are scattered, once similar places were captured in the memoirs of the writer’s mother. A hell of a path where the Sicilians are heading towards emigration. The Nail is the story of an immigrant who killed one of the girls. According to him, the nail found his victim.
Both parts of the film are united by mourning for the lost roots of the Sicilians and the turning point of the time before and after World War II, when not only Italy, but probably the whole of Europe lost a part of itself. The story of the journey of dust, tragicomic and even somewhat prosaic, outweighs in its integrity the grotesque murder of a girl, a nail.