Roberto Rossellini

  • Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Do I really need to restate how much I don’t care for Italian neorealism? But here is Stromboli to remind me of how much I really don’t care for it. It speaks volumes that I watched the film not for its genre as much as for its star Ingrid Bergman – and that Bergman’s character spends much of the film being exasperated at being stuck in an uninteresting fishing village. That intention certainly translates to the viewer stuck alongside her: when will the volcano in the backdrop of the village finally erupt so that everyone will be put out of their misery? Handled by writer-director-producer Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli is not a bad movie – but it will try the patience of anyone not necessarily attuned to the specifics of Italian neorealism. The story around the film is more interesting than the film itself (and accordingly, consumes far more space on the film’s Wikipedia page than its plot summary) – it’s the film that brought Bergman and Rossellini together for a well-publicized affair (while they were both married to other people) that led to Bergman being called no less than “a powerful influence for evil” on the US Senate floor (not one of that legislative body’s finest moments) and the effective eclipse of her Hollywood career for half a decade. Talking about Stromboli is a discussion about American prejudice and censorship circa-1950s – far more interesting than the content of the film, even if the volcano does add a bit of spice to the neorealism. But what else could we expect?

  • Paisà [Paisan] (1946)

    Paisà [Paisan] (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Viaggio in Italia [Journey to Italy] (1954)

    Viaggio in Italia [Journey to Italy] (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’m going to keep this short—writer-director Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy is a good film, maybe even a great one, but not for me. Its depiction of a quarrelling couple well on its way to dissolution is depressing enough (although the film is working toward a better resolution), but the film’s loose, slow, episodic, almost improvisational quality isn’t the kind of thing I go out of my way to see. The black-and-white cinematography often stops the Italian scenery from being as impressive as it should be. I don’t quite dislike Journey to Italy—we get good performances out of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, the intrusion of the Vesuvius eruption into the narrative is clever, and there’s a travelogue-to-1950s-Naples quality here that’s interesting. But it’s not the kind of film I get enthusiastic about.

  • Roma città aperta [Rome Open City] (1945)

    Roma città aperta [Rome Open City] (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.