La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty Italy 2013)

A wit I can't recall lamented in blunt irony that the rich are always with us. Fifty years after Fellini invited us to vicariously savour la dolce vita, another film-maker offers another glimpse into the demimonde, in a richly baroque, loving embrace of a Rome where ancient artefacts host the bunga-bunga vapidity of the latest incarnation of Roman excess. Luscious young women gyrate to pulsating dance music and bored rich people luxuriate in their ennui and self-absorption. Our guide is Jep Gambardella, a journalist on the cusp of old age. He once wrote a novel, something of which we are reminded rather too often, and loved a girl in his lost youth. Surprise, surprise, he finds his life wanting. A spiritual emptiness not so much a problem but a conceit. Much like his designer clothes and acid wit. For him, a funeral is a performance.

Jep, more with languor than urgency, between cigarettes and while staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, ponders the big questions in a small way. Is director Paolo Sorrenti playing a rather elaborate joke on the glitterati of film who like moths to the flame frenetically flutter in their ecstatic worship of this film? Is it all "blah, blah" as Jep muses in one of his rare lucid moments. Perhaps. Or maybe he actually is serious that we should care about Jep our guide.

Like the limping man with the mysterious suitcase, Jep has all the keys to the beauty of Rome. Yet he has never found its soul. Why? Not for want of trying. He most likely has looked in all the wrong places. Where are the right places? Sorrentini doesn't show us. Indeed does he even know? His Rome is a place beyond normal lives. Every frame is immaculately composed, but with all spontaneity excluded. A dead beauty where the mess of real lives is kept at an ethereal distance, lest it contaminate those perfect compositions.

Thankfully Sorrentini stumbles at the end. Enter a desiccated 104 year old toothless nun - a gratuitously banal caricature of Mother Teresa - and an ambitious cardinal. Her aphorisms are empty, and the cardinal, the bishop most likely to be the next Pope, who would rather talk about food than matters spiritual, has "no answers". He leaves the scene behind the gliding curtain of his glimmering limousine after insincerely blessing our lost hero. In these pitfalls Sorrentini exposes the inadequacy of his own answers. Jep will now write another novel about "the great beauty" beneath the "blah, blah". Just who is supposed to care?

There is a certain irony in seeing this film over 6 months after it's release. There is now a new Bishop Of Rome. He does not drive around in a shiny limousine and he doesn't live in a gilded palace. He picks up the phone and talks to people who have written to him with their problems. People in that world beyond the magnificent terraces of the rich.

Big Deal on Madonna Street (Italy 1958)

“Rubare è un mestiere impegnativo, ci vuole gente seria, mica come voi… Voi al massimo potete andare a lavorare.” [Robbery is a serious craft, you need to know what you are doing, not like you guys… the best you can hope for is honest work.]

A wacky gang of incompetent penny-ante Roman felons hatches a heist with hilarious consequences.  This is all that really needs to be said about this classic cinematic caper from the masters of la comedia all’italiana, the writing team of Furio Scarpelli & Agenore Incrocci, and director Mario Monicelli, but of course dear reader you have come here expecting more. At least four-to-five hundred words, choice turns of phrase, a display of filmic erudition, and a certain – even if counterfeit – humility. Oh well, if I must.

As well as a neo-realist patina in the scenes filmed on the streets of Rome courtesy of DP Gianni Di Venanzo, there is a dark expressionism in the night scenes that gives a dark edge to the comedy in Big Deal on Madonna Street. More on the flip-side later. Piero Umiliani contributes a boppy jazz score, which adds a lot to the fun.

There are also extensive connections with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves from a decade before which go beyond the thematic. For those who are familiar with De Sica’s film there is a discomfiting irony in a scene at the start of Big Deal on Madonna Street where a stolen pram is sold to a fence – the petty larcenist saying he is reduced to pinching prams as almost all cars and bicycles are now fitted with alarms – and later with the gang stealing a movie camera to case the scene of the heist from the very same flea market where De Sica’s Antonio desperately searches for his bicycle. Then there is the engaging comedia in Bicycle Thieves from Antonio’s young son Bruno, who in his innocence is the aching counterpoint to the father’s despair.  The comic relief afforded by his presence is to be cherished.  His first scene when he is cleaning the bicycle for Papa’s first day on the job is full of pathos and humour – Bruno telling Antonio that the pawnbroker didn’t look after the bike as there is now a scratch on the pedal and that he would have complained.  This is by way of saying that in Monicelli’s film as in De Sica’s, the unique flavour of the Italian language is integral, and with a number of the character’s speaking different dialects, the individual characterisations have a spice all their own. Sadly so much of this expressiveness is lost in translating the dialog for the sub-titles. The line I quote at the top of this essay is redolent of an idiom and humour that can never be fully translated.

Humour. The essence of true comedy is the unexpected. Whether from razor sharp wit, innuendo, risible delusions, or slapstick, laughter is truly unleashed when we are caught by surprise, when unassailable absurdity is topped by the even more ludicrous; and we are again reduced to tears of joy, aching sides, and uncontrollable fits of coughing.  Your soul skips and oxytocin fills your blood-stream. All is well with you, and the world.  But just in case you get too carried away Monicello has a poor sod – un povere disgraziato – chased into the path of a tram and killed. Cut to the crematorium and Toto in dark glasses:  ”Better later than sooner.”

If the essence of true comedy is the unexpected, the key to great comedy is love. An empathy with the absurdity of existence, of its ultimate futility, and a sad fondness for the pathos of life.  The attitude that yes we are miserable but heck we can die laughing.  This madness takes hold of De Sica’s Antonio when he blows whatever money he has left on lunch in a restaurant.   The original Italian title for Big Deal on Madonna Street, I soliti ignoti aka “The Usual Unknown Suspects”, has a savour of this pathos (while its aptness is revealed in a newspaper headline shown on the screen just before the end title).

I wonder what was going through Mario Monicelli’s mind as he prepared to end his life by jumping out of a hospital window in 2010 at the age of 95.  Perhaps he was thinking thoughts like those he admitted to in an interview he gave three years earlier: “Death doesn’t frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive, not being dead.”

This idea of  ’absence’ as loss is behind the greatest moment in I soliti ignoti, which is not found in the rollicking absurdity and high jinks that lead up to the disaster, nor in the towering stupidity and incompetence of the heist proper, but on the early morning after when the perps straggle out onto the deserted streets of Rome, say their goodbyes, and go their separate ways. A palpable regret suffuses the screen and your own heart aches for your loss as well as theirs.  Arrivederci.  Till we meet again.

Due soldi di speranza (Italy 1952)

Due soldi di speranza is an engaging neo-realist tragi-comedy from little-kown writer/director Renato Castellani. A story of young love between a chronically unemployed ex-soldier and a willfull firebrand of a girl in an economically depressed village outside of Naples, employs high farce to telegraph the depth of social disadvantage in the immediate post-war years and the hypocrisy of state, church, and peasant mores. A maelstrom of impulsive actions reach a climactic rebellious act, which while glorious is steeped in tragedy.  A deft work with wonderful cameos and authentic vignettes, framed by a cheeky insouciant score from Alessandro Cicognini. The two leads Maria Fiore and Vincenzo Musolino are a delight.

Received a BAFTA for best film in 1954 and director Castellini was awarded the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1952.

Summary Judgements #2

Open City (1945) A landmark film, the meaning of which goes beyond the immediate drama of the story and its historical genesis, where the struggle of daily existence and life's tragedies are related unadorned and with supreme empathy and authenticity, of its time and beyond time, grounded in real lives played out in real homes and real streets. Open City opened up the horizon not only of a freedom so harshly won, but of a new cinema beyond the 'illusion of reality'. Vittoria de Sica in his introduction to the published script for Miracle in Milan, wrote the neo-realists "offered a transformed reality from which they drew forth the inner, human, and therefore universal meaning: it is reality transposed to the realm of poetry". When Francesco speaks to Pina on the eve of their wedding, he speaks of aspirations that are timeless: "We're fighting for something that has to be, that can't help coming. Maybe the way is hard, it may take a long time, but we'll get there, and we'll see a better world. And our kids will see it. Marcello and - him, the baby that coming". [From my review of The Grapes of Wrath]

Bicycle Thieves (1948) Visual poetry; a truth beyond artifice; a transfiguration of the everyday to the realm of the sublime; the love, the sorrow, and the pity of real lives lived in earnest and without ego, artifice, affectation or ambition. Art for the people of the people and for all time.

Casino Royale (2006) Banal and boring. The new Bond is a fascist. Innocent bodies drop like flies as Bond establishes his hero persona with his macho daring-do and his elongated gun-cum-phallus. The body count is only necessary ‘collateral damage’ in the greater ‘just cause’.

The Air I Breathe (2007) A very unusual Hollywood movie that goes beyond genre and episodically explores dark and mystical motifs: memory, love, violence, criminality, ambition, alienation, urban ennui, existential angst, causality, serendipity, and even the butterfly effect cum six degrees of separation.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) An ugly urban fable, that by it’s end leaves you stunned as to why this film should have been made at all. A family of psychotics in a killing frenzy like the sharks in Orson Well’s 'The Lady From Shanghai': "Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy… they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes. And you could smell the death reeking up out of the sea".

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Not perfect but a quirky engaging celebration of true freedom in all it’s darkness and richness. The film is weakest when it tries to analyze the reasons for the journey, and in the banal interlude at the nunnery. We don’t need a reason for living… or for dying.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) A strange violent story of nostalgia and social mis-critique. Working-class Boston is portrayed in a pseudo-realist opening sequence of urban ennui and alienation as some 'lost' place, where an urban flatfoot and his girl-friend get to play judge, jury, and executioner, with a climax where the gumshoe executes an un-armed and deranged psychopath in a squalid tenement. Fascist violence as urban justice - rollover Tarantino.

There Will be Blood (2008) A rambling confusing epic with no soul.

Summary Judgements #1

Frost/Nixon (2008) Revisionist souffle.

The Class (Entre les murs - France 2008) "A little less conversation, a little more action please".

Up The Yangytze (Canada 2007) Heartrendingly sad. The real China.

The Fountain (2006) Profound and mesmerising journey into the unbearable deepness of being.

Trouble in Paradise (1932) Joyous irreverent elegant fun with a delicious erotic playfulness.

The Apartment (1960) Very dated and very tedious. Watch Mad Men instead.

Dracula (1931) The first 20 minutes is magic. Flounders after the count leaves his castle.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Camp noir horror - a visual feast.

My Brother is an Only Son (Mio fratello è figlio unico - Italy 2007) A saga of two brothers - one a fascist the other a marxist - in 60s Italy. Powerful and affecting.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is a testament to the people whose story is told, and is a profound and revolutionary social and economic critique, the meaning of which goes far beyond the Oklahoma dust-bowl and the orchards of California. It is both mythic and real, and its humanity universal. It is the greatest American film ever. John Ford's realisation captures the spirit of Steinbeck's novel completely. His adaptation is respectful, and his ending utterly faithful to the book's intent. Steinbeck's suckling metaphor is one of hope, where from the deepest tragedy rises a like a phoenix the basic decency of simple people giving all that they have left to a stranger. Tom's leaving is inevitable. He is radicalised and his path is strictly defined. What happened to the Joads happened to thousands of families: the banks' perfidy, the exploitation by farmers, and the hostility to organized labour, are historical facts, and these essential elements are the backbone of the film. The killing of Casy is one of the most politically powerful scenes in US movie history, and the case for government intervention is as strongly stated as it can be in the camp sequence. Gregg Toland's photography prefigures the neo-realists. The integrity of Nunnally Johnson's script and Ford's unerring sense of pathos, have left us not only a film of deep humanity but an important social artefact. The makers of The Grapes of Wrath, to paraphrase De Sica on the neo-realists, offer us "a transformed reality from which they drew forth the inner, human, and therefore universal meaning: it is reality transposed to the realm of poetry". Roberto Rossellini's landmark neo-realist Open City, is also a film the meaning of which goes beyond the immediate drama of the story and its historical genesis. It is film where the struggle of daily existence and life's tragedies are related unadorned and with supreme empathy and authenticity. Open City is a film of its time and beyond time, grounded in real lives played out in real homes and real streets. The film opened up the horizon not only of a freedom so harshly won, but of a new cinema beyond the 'illusion of reality'. When Francesco speaks to Pina on the eve of their wedding, he speaks of aspirations that are timeless: "We're fighting for something that has to be, that can't help coming. Maybe the way is hard, it may take a long time, but we'll get there, and we'll see a better world. And our kids will see it. Marcello and - him, the baby that coming". Tom Joad's last word's to his mother echo the same sentiments: "I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."