Hot sunny days of calamity govern the lives of five sisters, who raised themselves after their parents died, in this touching story
An almost unbearable sadness settles like the sunset on this beautifully composed tale of how a tragic accident in childhood poisons four adult lives; people who grow old while remaining frozen in a single, stricken instant like cursed souls in a fairytale. The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.
The setting is, initially, the 1980s or thereabouts, and the five Macaluso sisters, Maria, Lia, Pinuccia, Katia and Antonella – ranging from eight or nine to late teens – live in a tatty top-floor apartment on the outskirts of Palermo. Their parents are dead; they look after themselves and have inherited their mum and dad’s business renting out doves (which they occasionally paint festive colours) for weddings and birthdays. One afternoon, they take off to a beach resort, the “Charleston”, attached to a grand restaurant, and while one sneaks off for a rendezvous with a girl she’s in love with, the other four go swimming out by a dangerous part of the pier structure behind the main restaurant building – with awful results.