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Time Stood Still
Two middle-aged men work as caretakers on an isolated dam construction site high in the snow-capped Italian Alps. When one of them leaves for the valley to spend Christmas vacation with his family he is temporarily replaced with an adolescent boy. The other man is both annoyed and intrigued by the boy and his habits: he listens to loud music, sleeps too long in the mornings and doesn't drink any alcohol. They barely speak to one another in the first couple of days. But when an avalanche cuts their small hut from electricity they slowly start growing more fond of each other.
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Reviews
hyped garbage
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
IL TEMPO SI E' FERMATO (TIME STOOD STILL) is a sensitive little story and Olmi's first feature film. It is set in a mountain hydroelectric station in wintertime. A young man assigned to work there gets to know and appreciate the older caretaker whose ways are so different from his own. The film is very visual and has hardly any dialog. It achieves, as do so many of Ermanno Olmi's later films like IL POSTO, THE FIANCES, THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, and CAMMINA CAMMINA a sense of "mystical humanity", whereby mundane events reverberate with a kind of luminous dignity.
A little known masterpiece and Olmi's first feature, the film takes place in the snowy mountains of northern Italy, where a tough old-timer of a guard and a fresh-faced young student keep watch over the construction site of a partially built dam during the winter. Forced to live at close quarters in a tiny workers' shed and cut off from the world below with little to do, the ill-matched couple are at first taciturn and mutually suspicious. When a sudden snow storm cuts their power supply and threatens to demolish their rickety wooden hut, they find themselves thrown together in a fight for survival. Shot in wide-screen black and white, with hilarious visual gags and spare but amusing dialogue, the film develops into a moving testament to the common humanity bridging the generations.
