A crow with a bell tied to its neck cleaves the skies of an archaic, mythological, almost pre-human Sicily. It is the first, alienating image of "Kaos", and it serves as a feathered Virgil on an odyssey through the soul of an island and, by extension, of all humanity. The title, borrowed from the name of the Agrigento district where Luigi Pirandello was born, is the most sublime of red herrings. The Taviani brothers' work is not an exploration of disorder, but a meticulous, almost alchemical, transmutation of life's chaos—the passions, superstitions, injustices, and follies—into the cosmos of art. It is a world-unto-itself, a tapestry woven from the raw threads of Novelle per un anno, in which the directors do not merely adapt, but evoke the writer's deepest spirit, giving it body, earth, and blood.

The Tavianis' cinema has always possessed a telluric quality, a visceral bond with the land and the communities that inhabit it, from Padre Padrone to The Night of the Shooting Stars. Here, however, their magical realism reaches its apotheosis. The Sicily of "Kaos" is not a mere backdrop, but a primordial entity, a stage of rock, dust, and blinding sun that seems sculpted by the same forces that shape the destinies of its inhabitants. It is a land closer to Medea's Colchis or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County than to the Trinacria of the daily news. The Tavianis, with Giuseppe Lanci's scorched cinematography, depict it with the same hieratic gravitas with which John Ford portrayed Monument Valley, transforming it into a moral landscape, a place where myth seeps through the cracks of the everyday.

The episodic structure, which could easily crumble into fragmentation, here becomes a symphony in four movements plus an epilogue. It is not an anthology, but a constellation. Each story shines with its own light, yet its position and luminosity acquire deeper meaning only in relation to the others. The Other Son is a Greek tragedy distilled in the despair of a mother (a monumental Margarita Lozano) who awaits letters from sons who emigrated to America, rejecting the one who remains, the fruit of an unspeakable violence. Her grief is an ancestral boulder, a lament that echoes Euripides' Hecuba, and her stubbornness in dictating letters to a world that doesn't answer is the first, potent incarnation of the Pirandellian absurd.

With a shift in tone that would have delighted Shakespeare, we move to Moonsickness, a tale that veers toward rural gothic, toward folk horror. A man, Batà, transforms into a howling beast under the full moon, prey to an atavistic and inexplicable malady. His new bride, Sidora, is terrified. It is an episode that seems born from a collaboration between Val Lewton and the Verismo of Verga: the lycanthropy is not a fantastical trope but a metaphor for an inner darkness, for the primordial fear of the other and the irrational that festers beneath the fragile crust of peasant civilization. Love and acceptance ultimately serve as an exorcism, but the vertigo felt before the chaos that dwells in the human soul remains intact. The image of Batà tied to an olive tree, illuminated by a cold and indifferent moon, is pure cinema, an icon of rare expressive power.

The comic heart, or rather, "humoristic" in the most Pirandellian sense of the term, beats in The Jar. Don Lollò Zirafa, played by a Ciccio Ingrassia who elevates the commedia dell'arte mask to heights of existential obstinacy, is a landowner obsessed with possession and logic. When his prized oil jar cracks, he hires a potter, Zi' Dima, who becomes trapped inside while mending it. The ensuing dispute is a masterpiece of paradoxical logic. It is Buster Keaton caught in a Zeno's paradox, a grotesque drama about form imprisoning life. We laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but we feel "the sentiment of the contrary": Zi' Dima's terracotta prison is the same mental prison in which Don Lollò has confined himself, a microcosm reflecting humanity's inability to transcend its own self-imposed rules.

The fourth episode, Requiem, addresses a theme dear to the Tavianis: a community's struggle against power. The peasants of a village fight to win the right to bury their dead on their own land, defying the local baron. It is the most choral segment, a fresco of popular rebellion that echoes the political dimension of The Night of the Shooting Stars, but strips it of a specific historical context to elevate it to a universal parable about dignity and the ancestral bond between a people and their land.

Had the film ended here, it would already be a masterpiece. But the Tavianis take a mortal leap, a jump into meta-narrative that consecrates "Kaos" in the pantheon of great cinema. The epilogue, Conversing with Mother, is one of the most sublime and moving reflections on the creative process ever to appear on screen. We see Luigi Pirandello himself (Omero Antonutti, who was the father-master for the directors, in a poetic short-circuit), returning to his childhood home for an imaginary dialogue with his mother's ghost. It is here that the film reveals its pulsating core. The stories we have just seen are none other than the tales his mother told to little Luigi. The act of storytelling becomes a way to defeat death, to give meaning to pain, to bring the past back to life. When his mother recalls a childhood trip to the pumice islands, the film abstracts itself from reality completely. Verbal narration becomes pure vision: a group of children disembarks from a sailing ship and runs lightly across a stark white beach, floating almost as if in zero gravity. It is an image of a blinding, Proustian beauty, a moment of time regained through the magic of memory and, finally, of cinema. In that moment, we understand everything. The Tavianis' cinema, like Pirandello's literature, is this: a desperate and wondrous attempt to give form to chaos, to find an instant of grace and meaning in the incongruity of existence.

Made in 1984, in an Italy that was leaving behind the gloom of the Years of Lead and entering a decade of hedonistic disengagement, "Kaos" is a fiercely counter-current work. Instead of looking forward, the Tavianis perform an archaeological dive into the country's cultural, mythical, and linguistic foundations, but without a trace of nostalgia. Theirs is a gaze that seeks out roots not to mourn them, but to understand the deep structures of human feeling and action. It is a film that speaks of emigration, mental illness, class struggle, and superstition with a lucidity that transcends folklore, turning them into universal categories. "Kaos" is the perfect meeting point between the intellectual vertigo of Pirandello and the epic carnality of the Tavianis, a dialogue between literature and cinema that enriches both. It is a sumptuous and terrible journey into a world that no longer exists, but whose passions, fears, and dreams continue to vibrate beneath the surface of our present, like the bell tied to the neck of a crow that never stops flying.