Dolci inganni

Alberto Lattuada slips under the radar for many among the pantheon of Italian greats, and yet his body of work is second to only probably Antonioni in Italian cinema; for me, he is the Eric Rohmer of Italian cinema, and that is a difficult achievement. Of course, Lattuada is making Italian films, and Rohmer French ones: the two different countries' societies differ vastly from each other, and hence inevitably the films also do. Thus, while Rohmer's films center a lot on conversations and philosophizing, more on the apparent, Lattuada's are more about emotions, the guessed-at internal state. In Dolci inganni (US title: Sweet Deceptions), Lattuada focuses on the adolescent cravings of a girl crossing into youth: the seductively young Catherine Spaak as Francesca. In a lovely way, the film is not simply about those cravings: but about the organic whole. The film devotes a lot of time to establish the world of Francesca, the life she inhabits: that's the middle chapters of the film, punctuated with some lovely comedy as well. This also offers a slight feeling of ennui to everyone and everything: Francesca struggling with her desires, the audience, the sunny citscape and its people all part of never-ending games, and life itself. It is like a much less bitter version of Antonioni.

More importantly, Dolci inganni gives a glimpse into a woman's assuming power, as Francesca understands the game, and decides to be at the top of it if she has to play it anyway. Francesca's mental-sexual development reminds me a lot of what happened with the little Chinese seamstress: both girls are infatuated, love and desire ardently, finally get what they want, and then realize that they hold power, a lot of power - through their sexuality. Both girls realize that the guy they thought they loved was just a means, a step for them to reach wherever they want to go, want to be: that the world is open to them, and both have no desire to remain tied to a promise given in ignorance just for the honour of their parole. However, whereas in the case of the little Chinese seamstress, the plot is more direct but at the same time the film has a much broader theme, Dolci inganni's theme is narrowed to precisely this and only this, and yet, maybe because of the censors, everything is very indirect, including Francesca's hinted-at desire for her brother (and, maybe, even her father). And probably now, after consummating her desire with the object of her infatuation, she is ready to face her desires and take her life in her own control. She has no desire to be the strong-looking but weak-willed gigolo she meets midway in the film.

The film is a beautiful study of human character, as many Italian films are. It has also a beautiful version of "Arriverderci" in it, though background music is not the film's strength at many other places (especially the opening sequences). The film of course succeeds primarily because of the young Spaak: she looks the part, and she charms and bewitches you along the entire length of the film, and long after.

La ragazza con la valigia

Valerio Zurlini's film La ragazza con la valigia (English title: Girl with a Suitcase) is one of those black & white masterpieces that seem to have faded with time: not because color has appeared, but because there is not enough time to savour each emotion, each wave of the sea. The beautiful film, in spite of its sentimentality, often a vice in films, doesn't give in to melodrama: rather, playing on ambiguity throughout, the film manages to seek the meaning of liberty through characters who seem on first glance to be trapped in their lives.

The world of Lorenzo, sincerely played by Jacques Perrin, is in straight colours: he adores his older brother, he will adore and love Aida, he adores the occasion of helping someone. A rich boy with a heart not so decadent as the society around him, he has however taken the higher pedestal, unwittingly: and he will continue to try to 'help' Aida up to him, rather than step down for once. He plays Florent of Anouilh's brilliant play La Sauvage, and so are there many Lorenzos and Florents in real life: meaning well, but unable to be adventurous, not willing to shake off their fetters and take a deep plunge, to die.

The world of Aida, played by Claudia Cardinale, is wrapped in shadows pierced by shafts of sunlight: she probably sleeps around or at least incites men, she is not ashamed to seek monetary donations from anyone, even if that means milking Lorenzo, and she is not someone whom you would bet your life on - maybe. A poor girl with a heart noble enough to let the boy Lorenzo adore the ground she walks on but not lead him on, she plays Thérèse in the play, and there are not that many Thérèses in this world, or if there are, then just like this Aida, they are misunderstood, mistaken, 'misknown': willing to barter everything, including her body, but not her soul, her freedom, she can step on and step off the pedestal, with no qualms of innocence and etiquette bothering her.

Well acted overall, the film's ending 15 minutes are indeed one of the best excerpts from cinema. Claudia Cardinale is considered to be sexy by some, so maybe she fits, though in my opinion someone else, more voluptuous and as much expressive, could have been better: however, the story of this cat-and-mouse game remains intriguing, and Perrin manages to fill the voids left by Cardinale. To top it, the cinematography and the beautiful musical score give an unexpected sublimeness to the film.

Luce dei miei occhi

Great actors putting in beautiful performances; some suitable, unobtrusive music; beautiful cinematography ... and yet, the ultimate strength of Luce dei miei occhi (int’l title: Light of My Eyes) is its fleshing out of every major character: Antonio, Maria and Lisa. I have seen even the best of films getting away with loose character development: that seems to be the job of books; but here is a film that slowly but surely comes home, that is not concerned with anything flashy but the eyes of Antonio, full of questions and reprising the role of “il viaggiatore” (the traveller). And yet the film leaves also a thousand questions in the air: through shots of people’s faces, crumbs of their conversations, flakes of people’s lives here and there, all as much real as the dreams in which Antonio moves: those stories are still to be made or getting somewhere made. That this world of immense possibilities exists, where travellers come, care for and leave, is established right at the beginning: when Antonio becomes a part and parcel of a family’s daily life. That even if a prime number, he can learn the ways of those on this planet is established, when he gets away blackmailing a man whose job this was so far to do (Donati as a lower-key version of Zhivago’s Komarovsky, and played by Silvio Orlando with as much guts as was done by Steiger).

The film once again belongs to Luigi Lo Cascio as well; seldom is that gentleness seen on an actor’s face repeatedly, in film after film (I have in fact never seen that before on the face of any male cinema actor after recognition). Because of Lo Cascio and the film’s more than outlined characters, the film is not merely some domestic or sentimental drama, some obsession with stories of here and now, as is common in a lot of Hollywood as well as certain sections of European cinema, too: rather, the film rises above them, partly on account of the science fiction analogy too running throughout the film, and raises several questions about our existence, our reactions, our emotions and sentiments, and how much it means for us to be blindly in love, to blindly believe, to want to do that. The loser is not the one indulging in unrequited love: love is its own reward. The loser is the one who could not accept to be loved, even if this everything be seen in victor and loser terms. Though, there is never any victor, never any loser, except in the eyes of a world which measures every action in terms of “getting her to bed”; everyone is grappling with own dreams and fears, with own insecurities and reasonings. Can you go beyond yours to understand those of others?

Le mani sulla città

One of the best films I’ve ever seen, Le mani sulla città (the insipidly translated UK title being Hands Over the City) goes into the uncharted territory of a film not having any representative characters: instead of characters that one could love or hate, instead of the rise and fall of one man or family or group, this brilliant film explores the nexus between politicians, law-makers and builders on a broader scale but constructing its gripping story around one particular incident: the collapse of a residential building in a poor, crowded area, coveted by those for whom deaths and misery are calculated in terms of profits and losses. While watching the film, there were times when floated through my mind certain scenes, subplots or ways of filming particularly from Z, La battaglia di Algeri, and Dilip Kumar’s Mashaal, and yet it is a testimony to this extraordinarily tight (but not sparse) film, that it stands head and shoulders above the three cited ones, gems in their own right.

One of the surprising and best things that director Rosi does is not to let have Rod Steiger, in whom the corruption is seen to be invested ultimately, a lot of screen time; neither does Steiger have many dialogues or even much acting to do, except keeping moping his brow all the time and looking tense. In many ways, he reminds me of Richard Burton here, who used to have a very similar acting method. The film is rather kept on the edge by a bunch of non-professionals, with Carlo Fermariello playing the stellar role of De Vita - the leftist politician who rejects (or who doesn’t see any profit in supporting) Steiger till the end. Interestingly, it is not De Vita’s character but Balsamo’s, who also happens to be a doctor, that seems the only disinterested one amid a stinking bevy of dignitaries, who only serve to fatten themselves and their art collections at the expense of people.

The discordant music, recurring throughout the film whenever the city “buildscape” is presented to the viewer, reinforces the double image of a residential complex, crucial to the film’s understanding: profits for Steiger and his like apparently, but what we have to imagine is that there are people living and growing there. Even in the case of the building collapse, there is no focus on the human suffering or fear in the aftermath: Rosi leaves that for us to imagine, since similarly for all his political characters, except that of Balsamo, the living beings there are no more than votes - to be used at the time of elections, but otherwise to be disposed of as profitably as possible.

The film is also something very relatable for people from countries like Italy and India, with their high amount of civic corruption. Both countries also have a strong presence of mafia, an area which this film chooses not to explore (on the contrary, Mashaal does that but in doing so, forgets the politicans; Z has all the bases covered, but instead of mafia, it is just local hitmen who are used to “silence” a political opponent). Le mani sulla città is one of the rare flawless films, not least for its clear-headedness about what to include and what to exclude.

L'avventura

When you do not believe in anything, how empty is your life? A story stunningly portraying the decay of Western civilization, L'avventura (literally The Adventure) goes where films as a rule don't go: a sincere attempt to comprehend reality. The film stops where Sandro stops: wanting sympathy, in despair, and himself not knowing where is the response. And, outside the pales of forgiving or forgetting, having crossed the sense of culpability in loving a forbidden, does Claudia know anymore?

Like leaves without wills blown at wind's whim, men and women flow about: what they leave behind is facades, ruins and church bells. What they desired is an answer to who they are: but they forgot to seek it in the other; they forgot to ask who the other is. Obsessed with the quest for themselves, every human comes crafted for them: Anna and Sandro have merely utilised each other in this lonely and selfish quest, and none has ever really thought about the other. None has known how horizons can be expanded; tragically, Anna's mysterious vanishing will only bring to the fore the inability to cope with themselves as they are. Sandro does find himself, would know what he is: a man unable to love. He will not need to look in Claudia's eyes for that judgment; he will need to look at the sky, or he will need to look at the buildings he never built. He is but the man who watches, envies, takes malicious pleasure in destroying the beauty he seeks, and tries to leave furtively; he is but the pitiable human who are born for greatness but are lost for ever in trying to deconstruct beauty. And the woman, Claudia?

Among the few women's films, l'Avventura is one. Monica Vitti (playing Claudia) neither is pretty nor knows very well to act, but the way Antonioni has used her is remarkable: she is not exactly wooden either, and her beauty is the kind that you will believe in one day and not the next day. Which is why, the constant focus on her face gives the film a double edge: a sympathy that she is ruining her life by falling into that love, but that she could not do anything otherwise. She is the one who still believes, who has that courage; and she has the horrible destiny of being undeceived: of how the others don't, and of how they can merely fit you in the scheme of things. Her belief, whether in Anna's being alive or whether in love and happiness, is never very well founded, yet never seems crazy, and seems a better thing to have than coldness which would be called realist by some.

It is a wonder to me how could a film be made so well demonstrating the decay at the heart of the West, and yet not take a preachy or a flippant tone. In a way, Fellini does the same thing with 81/2 but he adds in a lot more absurdity, which makes the effort that much less touching. Rohmer does the same thing in all his films, but Rohmer is more like Zola: he is empty of ideas. He only points the microscope at the bacteria, but has no ideas about the bacteria's place in universe. In addition, using stilted dialogues and contrived situations, Rohmer can often be preachy and indulging in vanity. But, here, we have a storyteller who knows the phenomenon and knows the evolution, who knows the germ and who knows the fruit: and one who is in love with stories and humanity, and thus with himself.

L'uomo che verrà

It is as simple as a Daudet tale and it is as touching as the silent moonlight is: with a surprising sincerity even when the subject is Nazi devastation, avoiding rhetoric and background music scores that seek to put a story in relief, and treating children more like adults, L'uomo che verrà (int'l title: The Man Who Will Come) is first and foremost a story that desires respect for being story, for being truth: references can be dispensed with, even the actual Marzabotto massacre on which the film is based. If you've liked Hollywood and Polanski, you will not like this film: insincerity, pomp and loud activism find not a single echo here. If you love Tarkosvkiy and have asked yourself the question what can make a man so cruel, you will want to watch this film.

Education? That is the central question of the film: can it immunize a man to everything, and all the morals and all the conscience are only an education, a conditioning we have been born bathed in? Goring a human flesh and using a woman as your lover as good as it lasts: is there something wrong in it? Is it only yet another argument to justify cruelty, or is there no cruelty but in the head, in the imagination, in the fulfilment of the Other's desire through you? People want to be humane, as they are expected to behave so; they can easily want to be efficient killers, if they are started being expected to behave so? Where does desire get born? In yourself or in the Other? And yet, sometimes a shooting squad member will falter, a boy's blue uncomprehending eyes will ask him strange questions: is it simply that he was too grounded in his earlier education of morals and stuff? Those blue eyes, they don't trouble the other serial killer, after all. Shouldn't the blue eyes trouble every potential killer so as to prove an absolute?

In a very different way, the film raises almost the same questions as Tarkovskiy's beautiful Andrei Rublev raises, most notably during the Tatar raid in Rublev: an almost Salvador Dali-esque sequence, but instead of laughing in its face more intent on asking and asking. Beautifully shot, parts of the film will remind you of that yet another great movie, L'albero degli zoccoli; the grinding poverty of an Italian village and the dominant Catholic influence (absent in present-day Italy) do not serve to pigeonhole the film in an epoch, but only mark the universality of man's material concerns: food for himself and for his horse, clothes and marriage. A son, a daughter. Like many other Italian films, the film does not employ actors quite known, except Maya Sensa, who slips into her quiet role very efficiently; editing is not fancy but simple, and the film slowly lurches from grim monotony to shocking barbarity: just like it would have been for the inhabitants of Marzabotto. Disbelief. No, this can't be possible. Surely, not the church? Surely, not the women and children? Surely, not the priest?

Roma, città aperta

Probably, stripping away the old Hollywood flair and style meant "neorealism": Roma, città aperta (Rome: Open City) works well, and grippingly enough, for a small snippet from the occupation days, but realism? Melville's L'armée des ombres, a film strikingly similar, would have highly merited this tag; Lino Ventura, even if an actor, looks more natural than the "non-actors" here. Realism doesn't just mean filming in devastated cities and showing life to be hollowed out (which is what was also probably thought by the Bicycle Thieves maker) but life as it is. The German officer might scorn the rhetoric that Italians are fond of, but there is hardly any visible rhetoric in any actor's mouth: instead, the director indulges in much of it - the running betrothed woman was bound to be shot; the German officer had to forget his cruelties in drink; the woman who gave them away had to swoon; the whistles sing before the priest is shot. Is this not rhetoric?

Rhetoric might be a reality in people's words, it hardly is when it comes to life. Things don't happen so opportunely, especially when one is not seeing in hindsight. A key force to realism is lent by an inability to see backwards or forwards: one lives in the moment, just as one lives life. To show depressing sights is not the answer; for that one can see a grim documentary. A film must work on the level of fantasy - even if it tries to project reality - the fantasy of a tightly strung thread running through; reality does not work on the basis of what might have been and eliciting such sighs from the viewers, but the brute slap of what happened and can happen, the realization and the fear, the action and the anticipation.

Though Melville's film came much later, as a viewer of the modern age having once seen it I see little to choose in Rossellini's film. The story of Rome: Open City is fortunately centered around only few characters, and yet a poor cinematography and lack of characterization make the film appear like one were watching a story through binoculars; there is hardly any depth to the film, and it seems to make blanket statements for or against each of the protagonists, covering all in a shroud of inevitable tragedy. As long as one breathes - which is reality - nothing's inevitable, nothing's impending!

Once Upon a Time in the West

If Sergio Leone hadn't already achieved greatness with the Dollars trilogy, then he does that with the grittiest Western I've ever seen: Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West) . A film that refuses to balance its characters in only the color of blood with no taints no sainthoods, as the Dollars trilogy does, each man and woman is living a pulsing life and struggling in the days of the birth of a great, industrious nation; those days when America was yet discovering its potential, the railroad was slowly bringing civilization to the last fighters against it, and instead of kings and business magnates the world order would soon have the voice for every man. Ennio Morricone once again gives the life its breath: his music defies definition; probably the only thing that can be said it suits the film and its epic story to the hilt, and sweeps up every emotion in human breast in its wake. Constructed from several references to Westerns already made, the film turns out to be a greater whole than the sum of its parts: not least because of a stunning casting coup.

Henry Fonda, who you could never dream of with any kind of negative shade, plays the villain of the film with nothing in the name of a white shade attached to him. He looks ruthless, and not a step ahead of the game. He simply fits the murderer with icy blue eyes, who loves to kill, to maim, to rape, to finish spirits. The nemesis is Charles Bronson, the icy character who refuses to even once take advantage of the woman he protects during the course of his revenge, even if the woman herself so desires. He is also the nemesis of the Man with No Name of the Dollars trilogy, a man who has again no name except that given by the bandit Cheyenne, "Harmonica," but who does not indulge in bloody meaningless duels all over the desert to vanish into dust, but is only after one man, and whatever else it entails. An important difference with Lee Van Cleef's character in For a Few Dollars More is that Bronson, caring only for revenge, remains a good man, helping anyone else he can and remaining grateful to people who help him; while Cleef, again after only revenge, has become ruthless to the whole world after his personal experience. This is the same reason that while For a Few Dollars More relies primarily on the strength of its climax besides the focus on desolate American landscapes, Once Upon a Time in the West achieves greater heights through its redemptive theme, and faith in human goodness. Faith that lasts in spite of a land and times where blood was much more easier to get than water.

A masterpiece from Leone, it was not much surprising that the film was a flop in the United States: it's one long reality, with a music to elevate and almost a documented bit of history to make the things hard to understand for teenyboppers.

Nuovo cinema paradiso

Many years back, when I had seen the film L’Armeé des Ombres, I had thought I would never see such a film again. But I was young, the mind was fickle, I had not seen the world and experienced first-hand the emotions, and I only remember the impression that I got, not the film, I only remember the smell of the paint, not the paint.
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, the film I watched only last week, was a different experience. That film taught me “love,” if it is something which can be taught and as far as it can be taught. The film was such a beautiful poetry, a logical whole for that feeling called “love.” Love for life, that it was, yes, toujours.

First there is the mother – waiting. Why is she waiting? And then we see a middle-aged, worldly-wise-looking man, whose face is never properly focussed upon, who but we still guess is only sleeping with a woman who isn’t much to him or he to her. And there’s a mother waiting...

We could never’ve guessed that what a heart-rending, beautiful story lies behind, what a soul behind that calm facade of that man, a man who is still waiting, who never left hope in spite of life. He never left Alfredo’s side – so persistent, so charming! He had to learn all his tricks, he had to immerse himself in all the wonder, in all the love that he felt, without caring for the world. The films mystified him, and he could never see them as the others saw them – they were not just “reels” and “business” to him. This is the whole essence of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso – hope. The soldier who waited in rain and snow and cold nights 99 times did not wait for the hundredth time – yes, you can say that he was not hopeful, who will be in such a hopeless case as love for a princess? Yet, he had the audacity to tell the princess. And he had the wherewithal to keep the hope alive, to always think that the princess waited for him. This is the essence of the film, the movies themselves.

Cinema is not just entertainment, meant for you to take your girlfriend just to spend time with her or your kids just to give you some relaxation and sense of realised power. No; it’s so much more. It’s the means of hope, the means of having illusions and nightmares, something through which we can really escape reality. It’s the virtual paradise – paradiso.
Yes, Toto was born with the vitality of hope and love, which is seldom there in people (even if originally present, it gets lost somewhere down the line). Toto would also have lost it, if not for Alfredo. It was the theatre projectionist Alfredo, who in the way he understood best, took hold, complete hold, of Toto’s (Salvatore, from now on, let’s call him) life. Stopping not short of anything, Alfredo even became the villain of the romance, just so as to inject a pain in Salvatore’s life which he could never forsake, and hence which would always prompt him for searching, for greater things, for finding love and meaning in life. Yes, Salvatore in that search became a great director, but he never was successful in his search, finally. He had loved too deeply, he had loved truly for once.

Salvatore would never leave his first loves throughout his life. All those scenes cut out by the parish priest and now bequeathed to him by Alfredo, those scenes he half-hidingly knew in his childhood, the scenes he enjoyed when the audience was shocked to find them cut – he loves them more than any of his own films probably, scenes in themselves worthless, mere snippets of kisses and nude bodies from various sources brought together, but laden with so much baggage of remembrances, with so much loving memory.

As is the usual case with French & Italian films, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso is a film lovingly, caressingly shot, to every frame of which the director seems to cling to up until the last moment, a film shot with so much detail. Witness the scene when Salvatore returns from his unfruitful watch outside Elena’s window; the gaiety elsewhere brings out his pain so sharply – bottles crashing out of the windows to dark streets where Salvatore is the lone, dejected walker.
The director’s cut is a 173 min version, and rightfully so. It brings out the film as it was meant to be: it gives ample scope to Toto the child and Salvatore the man. The man who always brimmed with energy and daredevilry, and still does so, the man who could charm an audience, a princess, and even a projectionist.