Criterion Sunday 498: Paisà (Paisan, 1946)

This film of Rossellini’s is less contained than his first in the “War Trilogy” that started with Rome, Open City. After all, it tells six separate stories rather than the one, across the length of Italy in the period leading up to the end of the war, as the Americans and British are found fighting the Germans on Italian soil. We see stories of partisans but also of women and children — whether living in poverty and desperation (as in the second and third stories), or helping out on the frontlines (as in the first and fourth) — and their encounters with the Allies. It’s not a film of hope, as there’s plenty of bleakness, but it feels like a series of stories that is trying to say something about the experience of war rather than (perhaps more usual) propaganda-friendly stories of triumph against adversity, or victory against fascism. In most of these stories, there is no victory because there aren’t really any good or bad guys, there’s just the struggle to survive when there are so few opportunities, and then in the fifth story there’s a different struggle that seems entirely abstracted from the war, of a group of Catholic monks whose primary interest is in ensuring the souls of the non-Catholic Americans can be saved. There’s a bit of humour in it, but a wealth of humanity, and even if the individual stories can sometimes seem a little bit moralistic, as a whole it offers a sweeping view of wartime struggle that it may be my favourite of his works.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Roberto Rossellini; Writers Sergio Amidei, Klaus Mann, Federico Fellini, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes and Vasco Pratolini; Cinematographer Otello Martelli; Starring Carmela Sazio, Dots Johnson, Maria Michi, Gar Moore, Harriet Medin, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs; Length 126 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Tuesday 25 January 2022.

Criterion Sunday 293: Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St Francis, 1950)

Watching a film about a 12th century religious figure makes you realise how thin the line is between devout religious belief and the kind of behaviour that would get you locked away nowadays, or at least given a hard stare on the bus (certainly development with regards to mental health doesn’t always demonstrate a clear line of improvement over the centuries). In any case, there are plenty of lessons we can all take from the simple and unaffected titular saint in this film (though as with Pasolini’s film about Matthew, he isn’t sainted in the original language title; indeed he is described as “God’s jester”). That Italian language title gives you a better flavour, though, of the vignettes, which largely revolve around a very cheerful if ascetic approach to the tribulations of life, many of which revolve around Brother Ginepro (Juniper), who more than once returns to Francesco/Francis’s order half-naked without his tunic after giving it away, and engages in acts of simple naive faith that shake even a local warlord, Nicolaio (Aldo Fabrizi, clad in a suit of armour that puts Bresson’s clanking knights to shame, and only emphasises this film’s latent comedy, reminding me as such of The Seventh Seal). Ginepro (Severino Pisacane) and the equally simple peasant Giovanni (Esposito Bonaventura) come across as the film’s unlikely heroes, although Francis himself (Nazario Gerardi) gets plenty of opportunity to teach his message of tolerance, such that what initially seems a little camp becomes by the end even something approaching spiritual — a feeling not hampered by some truly stunning black-and-white cinematography.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Roberto Rossellini; Writers Rossellini and Federico Fellini; Cinematographer Otello Martelli; Starring Nazario Gerardi, Severino Pisacane, Esposito Bonaventura, Aldo Fabrizi; Length 89 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 9 February 2020.

Criterion Sunday 246: I vitelloni (1953)

I gather that the title sort of loosely means “the idle men”, but I like to think of it as “the lads”, because that’s what this film is about, a group of five young men in a small seaside town, who have hopes and aspirations and find them somewhat waylaid in the whirl of life. The film is largely focused on the ladies’ man Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), who despite his early marriage and child finds plenty of time to flirt with other women, though the other four variously come into focus throughout the piece. It’s beautifully shot, with a fantastic sense of framing, as these five men are first seen hanging out with one another, before the framing starts to fracture and they each move into their separate worlds. There are some lovely set-pieces, and a strong sense of a world that’s been left behind, and a nostalgic pull to a certain vision of provincial Italian life (even though this is a film contemporary to when it was made). Perhaps that’s the black-and-white, perhaps it’s just innate in the thematics of the story. But escape from the dreary monotony is an ever-present pull in what is to my mind one of Fellini’s finest films.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Federico Fellini; Writers Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano; Cinematographers Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli and Luciano Trasatti; Starring Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi, Leopoldo Trieste; Length 83 minutes.

Seen at National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 16 June 1999 (and most recently on DVD at home, London, Sunday 21 April 2019).

Criterion Sunday 219: La strada (1954)

Nights of Cabiria remains my favourite Fellini film, but of course Giulietta Masina was pretty great in everything she did with Fellini. Here she plays a wide-eyed naïf, but almost a caricature of that, so very ingenuous does she appear, so simple in manner and trusting in affect. Of course, the story takes her down some bleak narrative turns, as she becomes hitched to a travelling sideshow performer (Anthony Quinn, looking unwashed), and the film follows in the footsteps of that profession by itself becoming something of a picaresque journey narrative. It’s a little bit winding and sometimes goes down dead ends, but for the most part it is carried by its performances, as well as the simple generosity of the writers towards their characters.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Federico Fellini; Writers Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano; Cinematographer Otello Martelli and Carlo Carlini; Starring Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn; Length 104 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 24 June 2018.

Criterion Sunday 81: Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950)

Federico Fellini’s first film was this ensemble piece set amongst a travelling troupe of performers putting on a variety show, of fairly mediocre quality one assumes from what we see of it. It’s led by Checcho (Peppino De Filippo) who is seen at the start being hounded by acting hopeful Liliana (Carla Del Poggio), much to the annoyance of his sweetheart Melina Amour (Giuletta Masina). Her arrival ruffles a few feathers as her ambition leads her to try and use the break to further a career for herself, and the film proceeds in a sort of bumbling, peripatetic way, introducing a number of side characters and tracing the fortunes of these various performers, most of whom never really get out of the rut they’re in. It makes the film rather a bittersweet look at the acting profession, but no less generous and enjoyable for that.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada; Writers Fellini, Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano; Cinematographer Otello Martelli; Starring Carla Del Poggio, Peppino De Filippo, Giulietta Masina; Length 97 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 21 February 2016.

Criterion Sunday 49: Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957)

Looking over a plot summary for Nights of Cabiria, I admit I found myself somewhat exasperated to see yet another Fellini film based around a happy-go-lucky prostitute. Surely a male-authored fiction by one such as Fellini (whose co-writers all look the model of patriarchal entitlement) could be counted on to treat sex workers as little more than adolescent male fantasies of sexual availability. After all, I found some of the treatment of the prostitute character in 1973’s Amarcord to be rather puerile and breast-fixated — hardly uncommon in 1970s cinema in particular, and that particular film was clearly made from the point of view of teenage boys. In any case (to return to the film under discussion), here, earlier in Fellini’s career, the spirit of his filmmaking seems different, closer perhaps to the neo-realism of his roots. There’s a real generosity towards the title character (played by Giulietta Masina), introduced being pushed into a river by a boyfriend who makes off with her purse, and who goes on to be screwed over by a succession of further weak men. She’s had a difficult life, but she has a strong friendship with a neighbour (and fellow prostitute), Wanda, with whom she has plans to get out of the game once they’ve paid off their mortgages. It’s once again a film with an episodic, wandering narrative, but at the core of everything is Cabiria, who despite her many setbacks manages to retain a cheerful if at times sarcastic demeanor. This is hardly to say it’s a feminist masterpiece, but it’s certainly got a lot more depth than I’d initially given it credit for.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Federico Fellini; Writers Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini; Cinematographers Aldo Tonti and Otello Martelli; Starring Giulietta Masina; Length 118 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 16 August 2015.