Roberto Rossellini

(On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s almost amazing to see how quickly Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan came together after World War II, given how it deals with evens scarcely two years distant. Set during the Italian campaign of 1944, it’s a film that presents 6 smaller stories as the American forces move north, either set during combat or shortly thereafter. It’s not a war film in the usual sense of the world, as physical violence takes second place to other considerations, and practically no large-scale warfare is shown. Clearly belonging to the neo-realist school, Paisan offers a stripped-down, on-location, down-to-earth approach with unpolished actors and scripts that don’t necessarily follow conventional lines. As for the stories themselves, they cover a wide range from theological debate to romantic betrayal, guerilla warfare, missed romance, culture clashes and life-and-death drama. I can’t say that I was particularly charmed by the results, but the production year makes it a fascinating piece of cinematic history, as the people playing the characters had direct experience of what they were playing, and the film could use the scarred settings where it all took place. It’s also interesting in that the film, coming far away from Hollywood, had little of the propagandistic bombast of most WW2 films until the late 1960s. War does much to make Paisan interesting, even to those usually dubious about neorealism—and so the film may end up reaching a wider audience than the arthouse crowd.

(Criterion Streaming, November 2019) My objection to Italian neorealism (or neorealism of all stripes) is how unremarkable it feels—what if I don’t want to be confronted with mundane reality of ordinary people leaving ordinary lives? But that’s presuming boring lives—and there were times where (unfortunately for those who went through it) reality wasn’t boring and faithfully presenting it took us to the edges of genre films. Case in point: Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City, which leaps up my rankings of Italian neorealist films by the sole virtue of being about exciting times—resistance to the Nazis in occupied Rome during World War II. In execution, it’s about as down-to-earth as other films of its subgenre: accidental cinematography, naturalistic dialogue, non-professional actors, found locations. But where the film becomes interesting, even if you don’t know about its production history, is in inhabiting a period that would soon pass in history. It’s immediate, unromanticised, almost documentary in its approach and knowing about the film’s production confirms it: the film was shot as World War II was winding down, seven months after the Nazis left town and were replaced by the Allies. The film was released nine months later, barely after the armistice. Rome Open City thus represents a quasi-documentary capture of Rome as it blinked in the sunlight after years of totalitarianism, a plot (inspired by real events) being almost inconsequential to the portrayal of life as it was, in circumstances that we would find extraordinary. I can’t say that I had a load of fun watching the result, but considering what I usually think of Italian neorealism, my muted reaction to Rome Open City is praise enough.