A boldly divided work that begins with the demise of the legendary Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. Pirandello’s wish had been that, after his death, his ashes be transported to Sicily, but during the Mussolini years his remains were interred in a Roman columbarium; with the war over, a delegate is dispatched to shuttle Pirandello’s ashes to Sicily, though not without some complications. But the stark black-and-white first half of the film surprisingly gives way to a color in the second half, which adapts Pirandello’s final story “The Nail,” about the circumstances of a young girl’s murder by a Sicilian immigrant boy in New York.
