THREE films by THREE Italian masters (De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti)

So, this was in some planning for a short time to revisit these three directors (one of whom, Rossellini, I just saw again last December), and it is part of a "Top 100 Directors Challenge" project I have been working on the better part of this year on Lettetboxd.  It also turned out that a) one of these was due back at my library today so I didn't want to make something late on account of procrastination, and as timing would have it b) today is the start of the San Genaro festival in Little Italy in Manhattan.  So... yeah, kind of flimsy stuff for a blog, but it makes some sense to me to collect all three of these titles - Vittoria De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951), Roberto Rossellini's General Della Rovere (1959) and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) - in one place.  And there is lastly some sentimental value with these filmmakers for me as not only were they all supreme in my burgeoning film-loving college years, I ended up writing about all three of their post-war films for a major paper at the tail end of my undergraduate time.  

So.... here goes!  How did this pan out?  As well as one can expect: you win some, you lose some.  A few spicy auteur-balls! 

"I'm not anything. I'm just Toto."

Math isn't always so difficult for some people, Toto.  Just take a leap of faith - like the idea that a cop can start singing uncontrollably for his men to "Charge" - and then the other cops sing their songs too - at the poor citizens all because of a miracle.  If cops only were more like that.  

Miracle in Milan is an inspired, sometimes funny and captivating series of comic vignettes that is like a buffet of metaphors, though it is all about just one or two or maybe three of them (the cabbage patch, the dove, the smoke on the ground, the figures in black suits, take your pick).  Even a shot where a man is running away from a few dozen spinning top hats (symbols of the rich and elite) is meaningful as an act of defiance/a satirical 'screw you' against the ruling classes.  Maybe I'm reading too much into the class aspect of it all, but I don't know how I can't not see it, and as a Big Fat Fable it maybe gets at some societal truths Bicycle Thieves couldn't (albeit that is the greater and more impactful/tighter film).

It sometimes comes off like De Sica and screenwriter/novelist Zavatini mean for all this to be concerned more with the entire group of people in this situation of "Will they all have to leave" than even Toto (a constantly impassioned Golisano), the hero of the story, a young man who was found as a baby in a cabbage patch (he's a Cabbage Patch Kid(TM) before there was such a thing as trademarks) and after leaving an orphanage takes the lead in bringing together these despaired shanty-town poor people into a group (but lest no forget his dead grandmother will come help him in his time of need). 

 But it also feels like a grand Socialist parable/fable, about the collective so to speak, like if some of the more fantastical tones (and Townie aspects of us vs then) of It's a Wonderful Life crossed paths with the shanty town from My Man Godfrey, not to mention the Biblical Moses overtones (only instead of plagues it's... cops being forced to sing instead of violence and top hat shenanigans).    

This is all to say Miracle in Milan is pretty wonderful, even if it largely takes off by the second half; in the first, there is beautiful direction throughout, even a moment or two that made me extra emotional (salty discharge alert, damn you eyes), as De Sica makes it seem so easy when it took great lot of empathy and care for many of his non-professional but still brilliant players.  It may feel like it takes some time to cohere since it is fairly episodic in building up many of these side characters; even a bit like when the shanty townspeople have a little contest with a drawn number for a whole chicken for someone and the older guy who wins and sits and eats it in front of everyone (not sharing), while everyone else stares and there's this tension of inequality that they are (whether they all realize it or not) having to constantly fight against, is revelatory.  

And by the time we get to the scenes with the dastardly (but relatively commonplace) Capitalist Mr. Mobbi, it's amazing how simply the filmmakers show him to not be some mustache twirling a-hole, but just another in a long line of middling fat-cat men who see a piece of land as a game to win.  This doesn't mean some of the socio-political commentary isn't, uh, a *lot* like when the one black guy asks Toto (in his Peak Miracle Granting period late in the film) to become White and does, and then sees a girl who has on Blackface (eegh), or that there isn't a more powerful (yet painfully true) provocation in the commentary about how the miracles become all about getting Stuff and material things for the Poor folks, and what else can Toto do at a certain point.  

But Miracle in Milan is so satisfying precisely because De Sica and Zavatini love the people they have in this story, despite their foolish actions or how much they like having their stuff or their plot of land, anytime there is a close up it can hit you like a wallop (or a very tight hug, or both).  Toto is a memorable character, mostly because of his goodness being his attribute and his crutch, and even as things look bleak for everyone down the line he keeps up his enthusiasm and good cheer (until, well, he can't).  There's also a lot of batty ideas and visuals that make it so idiosyncratic and special, like Capra on steroids.  I liked it a lot.

 

A strong and at times profound and always good drama that has a few sketchy visual effects (the rear screen projection is pretty poor), and it runs a little long.  But my goodness, Vittoria De Sica gets the kind of writing and character that a thousand other actors would sell their kidneys for. 

 You get to see a full arc with Bardone, and it unfolds with enough time for the change to happen gradually: man who is quite charming and effective as a con-man in the first half who is, as a kind of emotional salesman, selling locals on the hope of seeing their loved ones again (for a price).  When one of these deals goes bust, he's arrested and given an "opportunity" to pose as a dead general that no one knows is really caput, and is put in jail to suss out who is so and so for a deal to get safe passage.  But that darn thing called humanity and not being a snitch bastard comes into play, and Bardone realizes he can't go *that* far into what the Nazis want.

It's an engrossing morality play, and if one can notice some of the lower budget this time - and I mean that as a mark against it, not something that adds to the verisimilitude and documentary-dramatic value like Rossellini's post war trilogy or Flowers of St Francis - that doesn't take away from how formidable, sometimes even humorous and tragic De Sica is in this role.  

What it comes down to seems to be this question: who are you when Fascism is crushing everyone around you, and who will you be if you don't stand up for those around you?  And there's some powerful dialog late in the film where a bunch of the Partisans (and Jewish resistance) facing certain Doom talk about doing "nothing" being the problem - what is the value of "something" - and while Bardone isn't part of this talk you can still feel him in the background, a witness to all of this. 

I'm impressed by the layers of actor-ly surface (one could say protection that De Sica pares down the longer the story goes as Bardone is beaten down (literally and figuratively), and by the end you almost forget what a charming talker Bardone was earlier in the story.  And it's not because he makes a grand speech or gets highly emotional, on the contrary the restraint is oddly palpable.  All that's left for the character is... solidarity in the demise.  Maybe not one of Rossellini's masterpieces, but so what?  It accomplishes much of what he sets out to do, despite some parts that are focused mostly on conversations and monologue.  

And you know what else?  Fuck Fascism wherever it is.

 "Do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity."  

Okay, maybe Death in Venice isn't mediocre.  It's just supremely unsettling to be in this man Gustav's point of view.  Christ, I mean all those wandering shots from Gustav on that beach looking around with zooms in and out at all those happy beach goers and not one shark in sight? Boo.

For real though, I come to this film after seeing and loving the majority of the Luchino Visconti works before; when I was becoming more immersed in world cinema in my college years and since then, his operatic, melodramatic, fully grandiose and movingly It's-About-Then-AND-Now immersive style and approach to character and setting, not to mention evocative costumes and lighting and an entire world that felt all his own, marked him as a major talent and craftsman (whether in black and white and more "Realistic" like La Terra Trema or Rocco and His Brothers, or the intensely romantic/tragic La Notti Binachi from Dostoyevsky, or the giant color epics of love and loss and decay in The Leopard and Senso).  Even in the works I thought were just "good" before (L'Innocente or The Damned), there was a lot to chew on thematically.  Death in Venice is the first one of his to outright not only let me down but frankly bore me.

Maybe some of that could go back to the original source of Thomas Mann's novella (I might have even tried to read it at some point, I don't know, I know I had one of his somewhere in my collection), but perhaps in a first person introspective narrative is where this story has more room to engage someone.  The whole central thesis of this project seems to be to get one into the mind-set of an aging man who sees himself as over the hill, only to have some new perspective when, on holiday, seeing a young (much too young) foreign teen and having an infatuation with him ignites a longing for... him, or something.

 That can make for a dense character tale, on paper.  If you're a filmmaker taking on that kind of material, you have to be careful to keep it engaging not just on the level of lush colors and good lighting and locations, but also to make us care a little about the people we are seeing.  Or... care isn't even the word necessarily.  Look, this is fucking leering stuff; the POV is the key thing, as Gustav is looking on a this boy, on the beach, in the restaurants, walking with his family, and so on, and sometimes he is looking at others too but mostly it is at him. 

 A minor (ahem) spoiler but it is important to note he never acts on all of this.  One can almost picture the straight-on porn version of this being unreleasable past an Epstein party or something.  At the same time, maybe making this really sleazy and hardcore would have added... something to this (?)  But because we are kept at a deliberate distance and there is never even a moment where we get to learn at all about this boy past that he likes to play on the beach and has to listen to his mother lecture (in Polish), it leaves him as a story device... for over two hours (!)

At a point in the last quarter of the film, there is a turn where Gustav tries to make himself look younger through lots of hair dye and even a make up job that makes him look (I'm sure intentionally) like a clown almost.  There's even a beat - to make another timely icky reference - where the dye runs down his sweaty head and he looks Iike Rudy Giuliani in that one photo you've all seen.  In other words, that is an interesting angle for the story, that this guy's vanity and sense of wanting to impress this young man, not to mention in the midst of what is actually happening in Venice which is an outbreak of a virus that is making everyone sick and much less able to make it so inviting a city, and if the film had been more about that I could see myself at least finding it watchable as more about the decay of this man on his introspective road to middle aged ruin.

You might say to me "well, Jack, that's not the book."  And yet that wouldn't hold water since, as many reviews have noted, Visconti and his writer changed it already from the character being a writer to a composer and conductor in the film version, and frankly in a movie you should have license to do *whatever you want* with your story if you're already going that route anyway (ironically, from what I've read, the make up on Dirk Borgarde was not successful in Visconti's plan to make him look like Mahler, which was the whole intention behind the change and inclusion of his compositions, and instead he looked more like *Thomas Mann* the author, to which this whole story was largely based in something that happened to him while he was on holiday).  This is all to say that what we end up getting is a lot of Gustav walking around, or sitting, and looking on in awe (he later calls it love) and.... okay, so?!

I started this review off saying this film is unsettling, and while there are a few beats where I felt my skin crawl it is not necessarily that for the whole run time.  I'd even say Visconti does a decent (but nor great) job at making this infatuation ambitious inasmuch that we can't even be fully sure he wants to be even closer to this boy but cannot, and that it is all about seeing a young person and projecting a life of failures and problems on to the next generation that has more promise and energy and general allure and beauty.  

But at the same time, what's on the page makes this man to be a cold stuck up aristocratic kind of turd - the kind of figure of upper mobility this director already made much more compelling in the Leopard anyway - and Borgarde, while trying his best, can't make him all that interesting to watch for this amount of time. Maybe with someone else, ie Lancaster wanted the part or even James Mason as a turn on what he did in Lolita, at least we could attach to a great actor.  But Borgarde isn't, not to mention the intrusions of another actor to (in flashback) yell and berate Gustav that doesn't do much to illuminate us past that the guy sucks, and... I don't know, man. 

Maybe it just isn't for me.  Is it an icky sad-song for a would-be kid toucher/fucker?  I don't know if I can go *that* far.  But is it, for all of its lush cinematography and gloriously felt music, a wash as a drama?  Yeah.