The Wide Blue Road
Despite its focus on the destruction of a proud man who loses his  livelihood,The Wide Blue Roadis a gorgeous, lyrical film refusing to be  boxed in by writer-director Gillo Pontecorvo's bathetic class sympathies. Yves  Montand plays Sqarciò, a fisherman on a small island off Italy's Dalmation  coast. With the fishing industry squeezed by a wholesaler's monopoly, the island  is beset by economic depression and strains between men who earn little by  fishing legally (using a net) and those--like Squarciò--who unlawfully use  dynamite. Once Squarciò is deprived of his bombs, his (and his family's) decline  is a foregone conclusion in Pontecorvo's fixed-destiny universe. Yet the  director is hardly blind to his setting's redemptive possibilities. The Adriatic  island's clarifying air, the dreamy, epic texture of the apposition of land and  sea--such elemental beauty mysteriously, simultaneously heightens and  ameliorates Squarciò's predictable doom.--Tom Keogh