[Note that this review may contain spoilers]
Starring the inimitable Toto, this 1952 comedy from Roberto Rossellini immediately engages the viewer through its opening reversal. For Toto’s character, Salvatore Lojacono, is on trial for breaking into prison and is doing his best to ensure he gets sent back there.
Via extended flashbacks punctuated by courtroom scenes set in the present, we learn that Lojacono, a barber, was sentenced to a 30 year sentence for a crime of passion, killing his best friend after discovering that the man had made advances on his wife, now dead, and he has found life on the outside intolerable.
Leaving the prison on parole after 22 years incarceration full of optimism, he first finds the street where his shop used to be is no more; his wife Aida has died while he was in prison.
Following a woman to a dance hall – it is hinted that Lojacono’s desires are of a sexual nature, though the circumspection with which the matter is both discussed in court and represented makes it difficult to tell – Lojacono next becomes involved with a group of dancers who making a bid at the dance marathon record, whom he winds up bankrolling after their manager / impresario admits to being broke. Rather than paying the bills the manager then disappears, rendering the record attempt and Lojacono’s generosity void as they are expelled from the dance hall.
It continues like this as Lojacono meets fellow ex-cons, each of whom proves more interested in continuing their old swindles and schemes than seeking an honest living.
Next, Lojacono happens upon his brothers-in-law who, with their family, turn out to have a fortune in large part based upon selling out a Jewish family to the Nazis during the war.
Even worse, in personal if not social terms, it is revealed that his own crime of passion and honour may have been for naught in that “we’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is more than she ever did” sort of way.
With its pervasive sense of despair and less obviously focused socio-political critique, Where is Freedom? seems an odd film for Rossellini to have made, but on reflection perhaps becomes understandable when contextualised.
The sense of hope and renewal expressed by his neo-realist films of the immediate post war period, that the struggle against Nazism and Fascism had been for something positive, in leading to a new understanding of the world, had, after all, failed to materialise.
The post-war re-alignment saw the hopes of Catholic-Communist co-operation fostered by the resistance dashed, with the post-war realignment resulting in the latter’s de-facto official exclusion from government and re-definition as an enemy within who would sell the country out to the Soviets.
As such, it is perhaps not so much that the film lacks focus, in the way that Rossellini’s earlier anti-fascist entries did, but that its focus has shifted to the new order’s hypocrisies and those of the people themselves. In the case of the former, it was the way the Christian Democrats (DC) denounced the purported godless materialism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) on the one hand whilst encouraging the development of a materialistic consumer society on the other. In the case of the latter, it was the unwillingness of the individual – or rather, as emphasised here, “amoral family” – as social and economic actor to engage in the kind of collective action that would have led to the better, more utilitarian outcome for all, as the prisoner’s dilemma and the logic of betrayal rather than co-operation it encouraged led to a worse outcome for most and the worst outcome of all for those, like Lojacono, who played the game by the wrong rules and were taken for suckers.
What this cynical view of human nature – or, bad faith in presuming that there is such a thing as human nature, and, if so, that it was one better understood by the DC than the PCI – also does is position the film an largely unacknowledged link between Bunuel’s 1951 Los Olvidados, with its savage, nihilistic denial of Rossellini’s earlier neo-realist optimism and Ettore Scola’s 1976 Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, with its reworking of neo-realism as grotesque pitch-black comedy.
Showing posts with label neo-realism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neo-realism. Show all posts
Monday, 11 May 2009
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Banditi a Orgosolo
In some ways this is a very different kind of film from those I usually discuss here.
It’s squarely an art house and auteur film, made in the numerically minority but critically dominant neo-realist style, rather than being a popular film.
In other ways there are remarkable similarities.
For it’s also a somewhat forgotten film, whose auteur, Vittorio de Seta, would seem to have been dealt a cruel blow by fate through the similarity of his name to that of the better known Vittorio de Sica and the emergence of his more traditionally neo-realist film at precisely the same point in time as directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi were moving beyond it.
The irony is compounded by the fact that de Seta’s film at times feels much like a cross between de Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s mentor Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema – i.e. two acknowledged neo-realist classics and a classic of the post neo-realist cinema.
Bicycle Thieves contains a similar story, with an incident taken from life, featuring a decent, ordinary man who suffers a misfortune that, because of social injustice, leads to tragedy.
But De Sica’s film is urban and modern, in sharp contrast to the traditional Sardinia of De Seta’s, where class consciousness, at least in narrow Marxist terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat if not in broader Hegelian ones of master and servant, is absent.
De Sica’s film also presents a father / son dynamic, which De Seta’s reconfigures as between older and younger brothers, closer in age and likely experience but with similar dynamics of misunderstanding and incomprehension.
Rosi’s film presents another tale of banditry set on another marginal island, Sicily. But Salvatore Giuliano was a personality whose story, by the time of Rosi’s curious quasi-documentary reconstruction – curious for its attention to detail and the structuring absence of Giuliano himself, almost always represented through others’ testimony and projections, like a Charles Foster Kane – was hoped to have become history through the forward march of progressive politics and policies.
De Seta’s film is set in present-day Sardinia, where nothing has really changed, with a typical protagonist who is almost always present and, even when not, remains the centre of attention on account of being equally wanted by the authorities.
Unlike Giuliano, who had an wider ideology, Banditi’s Michele Cossu is guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a wrong understanding of the world.
Brought up to understand that one does not get involved in others affairs, he has no choice (i.e. in terms of anthropological rather than existential freedom) but to let some fugitives stay in his hut overnight. Similarly when the Carabinieri arrive, asking questions, he had no choice but to deny that he has seen anyone, despite material evidence to the contrary. And thus, when the Carabinieri and the bandits exchange fire, resulting in the death of one of the former and knowing full well that he will be taken as an accomplice in the crime, that he has no choice but to flee with his flock of sheep – the flock which, purchased on credit, offer his only hope of improving his family’s position and escaping his father’s fate of tending to the padrone’s animals rather than his own.
It’s in comparison with La Terra trema that Banditi a Orgosolo’s weaknesses, such as they are, come to light. While both films have naturalistic performances from non-professional actors – Michele Cossu and his brother play Michele Cossu and his brother – and present plenty of enthnographic details, such as the puttees worn by the shepherds here, Banditi has two aspects which I felt detracted.
The first, albeit one common to almost all neo-realist films, is the use of non-diegetic music that seems, to me, to cut against the realist ideal even if it enhances the melodramatic impact. (In the neo-realist’s defence, we can also not that the use of post-synchronised sound had always given Italian cinema a greater camera mobility than its rivals.)
The second is that everyone seemed to speak in a comparatively standard Italian, in contrast to the Sicilian dialect employed by the fishermen in La Terra trema, which famously had to be subtitled in order to be made comprehensible to non-Sicilians.
Maybe this reflects the changing reality represented by the two films, that the Sicilian and Sardinian islanders were increasingly being brought into wider Italian society.
But the opening narration in de Seta’s film, which states the only aspect of the modern world the shepherd’s were familiar with was the gun, would seem to contradict this.
Maybe it thus represents a rare concession to the audience, that our understanding of these people and their situation would be enhanced by dubbing into a more standard Italian, so that attention would not be distracted – at least for the domestic audience, the ones with the potential to make change – by the subtitling.
If it’s a case of ethics over aesthetics, its thus understandable and not sufficient to distract from De Seta’s truly extraordinary achievements here.
It’s squarely an art house and auteur film, made in the numerically minority but critically dominant neo-realist style, rather than being a popular film.
In other ways there are remarkable similarities.
For it’s also a somewhat forgotten film, whose auteur, Vittorio de Seta, would seem to have been dealt a cruel blow by fate through the similarity of his name to that of the better known Vittorio de Sica and the emergence of his more traditionally neo-realist film at precisely the same point in time as directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi were moving beyond it.
The irony is compounded by the fact that de Seta’s film at times feels much like a cross between de Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s mentor Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema – i.e. two acknowledged neo-realist classics and a classic of the post neo-realist cinema.
Bicycle Thieves contains a similar story, with an incident taken from life, featuring a decent, ordinary man who suffers a misfortune that, because of social injustice, leads to tragedy.
But De Sica’s film is urban and modern, in sharp contrast to the traditional Sardinia of De Seta’s, where class consciousness, at least in narrow Marxist terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat if not in broader Hegelian ones of master and servant, is absent.
De Sica’s film also presents a father / son dynamic, which De Seta’s reconfigures as between older and younger brothers, closer in age and likely experience but with similar dynamics of misunderstanding and incomprehension.
Rosi’s film presents another tale of banditry set on another marginal island, Sicily. But Salvatore Giuliano was a personality whose story, by the time of Rosi’s curious quasi-documentary reconstruction – curious for its attention to detail and the structuring absence of Giuliano himself, almost always represented through others’ testimony and projections, like a Charles Foster Kane – was hoped to have become history through the forward march of progressive politics and policies.
De Seta’s film is set in present-day Sardinia, where nothing has really changed, with a typical protagonist who is almost always present and, even when not, remains the centre of attention on account of being equally wanted by the authorities.
Unlike Giuliano, who had an wider ideology, Banditi’s Michele Cossu is guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a wrong understanding of the world.
Brought up to understand that one does not get involved in others affairs, he has no choice (i.e. in terms of anthropological rather than existential freedom) but to let some fugitives stay in his hut overnight. Similarly when the Carabinieri arrive, asking questions, he had no choice but to deny that he has seen anyone, despite material evidence to the contrary. And thus, when the Carabinieri and the bandits exchange fire, resulting in the death of one of the former and knowing full well that he will be taken as an accomplice in the crime, that he has no choice but to flee with his flock of sheep – the flock which, purchased on credit, offer his only hope of improving his family’s position and escaping his father’s fate of tending to the padrone’s animals rather than his own.
It’s in comparison with La Terra trema that Banditi a Orgosolo’s weaknesses, such as they are, come to light. While both films have naturalistic performances from non-professional actors – Michele Cossu and his brother play Michele Cossu and his brother – and present plenty of enthnographic details, such as the puttees worn by the shepherds here, Banditi has two aspects which I felt detracted.
The first, albeit one common to almost all neo-realist films, is the use of non-diegetic music that seems, to me, to cut against the realist ideal even if it enhances the melodramatic impact. (In the neo-realist’s defence, we can also not that the use of post-synchronised sound had always given Italian cinema a greater camera mobility than its rivals.)
The second is that everyone seemed to speak in a comparatively standard Italian, in contrast to the Sicilian dialect employed by the fishermen in La Terra trema, which famously had to be subtitled in order to be made comprehensible to non-Sicilians.
Maybe this reflects the changing reality represented by the two films, that the Sicilian and Sardinian islanders were increasingly being brought into wider Italian society.
But the opening narration in de Seta’s film, which states the only aspect of the modern world the shepherd’s were familiar with was the gun, would seem to contradict this.
Maybe it thus represents a rare concession to the audience, that our understanding of these people and their situation would be enhanced by dubbing into a more standard Italian, so that attention would not be distracted – at least for the domestic audience, the ones with the potential to make change – by the subtitling.
If it’s a case of ethics over aesthetics, its thus understandable and not sufficient to distract from De Seta’s truly extraordinary achievements here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)