When worlds collide sparks fly, volcanoes erupt

Stromboli production still by Gordon Parks

Perhaps you know the story. Ingrid Bergman, post-Casablanca (1942) and at the height of her radiance and bankability, writes a letter offering her services to Roberto Rossellini, director of the neorealist masterpiece Rome Open City (1945), also famous, if in more rarified circles. Bergman describes herself as “a Swedish actress who speaks English very well.” As for Italian, alas, all she knows is “Ti amo.” I love you. If that strikes you as several kinds of proposal, what follows validates your suspicion. Both parties were married and those marriages ended very publicly. Bergman abandoned her family and one of the great Hollywood careers for Rossellini, Italy, and what was then considered failure. Bergman and Rossellini’s marriage didn’t last long, but they managed to make three features and three children—one of whom happens to be Isabella Rossellini. Over the years those features have been reappraised and recognized as remarkable. Criterion has collected each of them and a trove of supplements for its new box set 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman.

Stromboli

Remarkable as all three are, I’m partial to the first. Set at the end of the war, Stromboli (1950) follows Karin (Bergman), a Lithuanian interned at a displaced persons camp in Farfa. She’s romanced by a handsome young Italian named Antonio (Mario Vitale). Their sole common language is an exceedingly broken English. (A word of advice: watch the English version supplied on Criterion's set.) Their tryst on either side of the barbed wire, neither having the slightest idea what they’re getting into, is deeply moving. “I don’t understand you,” she tells him with an affectionate laugh as he babbles away. She doesn’t know the half of it—yet. Her options reduced to nil, Karin accepts Antonio’s proposal of marriage. She’s freed, only to be held captive on a volcanic island and former penal colony whose entire populace, Antonio included, she finds unforgivably backward.

Stromboli

Bergman is magnificent, petulant, totally un-ingratiating, and it’s a great story, extreme yet familiar to many—my grandmother was a war bride and could surely relate to Karin's suddenly finding herself in a strange, difficult, isolated place amidst people with whom she feels no affinity. But what makes Stromboli so unforgettable are its documentary aspects: the cast of locals; their singing, mournful even when celebratory; the mythical manner in which Rossellini captures their tuna fishing rituals; an actual volcanic eruption, with the villagers watching the whole thing from boats just off the shore. The collision of Bergman's inherent glamour and the very real rugged island life surrounding creates an engrossing frisson. 

Europe '51

Revisiting the themes of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Europe ’51 (1952) casts Bergman as a society woman who transforms into a modern saint following the tragic death—an apparent suicide—of her 12-year-old son. Our heroine gradually strays from her moneyed, sheltered life—a key sequence finds her covering for a friend (Giulietta Masina!) who works in a factory, and the rapid cutting between her uneasy visage and the factory machinery recalls moments in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), while the creepy exterior shots of the factory look forward to similar images of industrial alienation in Red Desert (1964). Her actions eventually draw the attention of authorities who deem her mentally ill and confine her to an asylum, whose stark walls also invoke Joan. The final scene, in which her admirers weep below her cell window, is curiously echoed in the final scene of Red (1994), one of the subjects of my previous post. 

Journey to Italy

Rossellini and Bergman’s final collaboration, aptly enough, concerned marital strife. Journey to Italy (1954) finds Bergman and George Saunders’ English couple visiting Naples to liquidate some assets gained in an inheritance. Unaccustomed to spending time alone together, they quickly realize they kind of can’t stand each other. So he goes off in search of kicks while she visits museums and historical sites. A startling, now famous moment has both witness archeologists unearthing a pair of clinging corpses, victims of the eruption that consumed Pompeii. Deep history comes to haunt the couple—fleeting pleasures or frustrations whither in the face of the eternal. Even if I don’t quite buy the climatic reconciliation, I believe entirely the difficult questions posed to these characters on their journey. The film is a quietly devastating exploration of long-term love and what it means to confront all we chance to lose. At least, thanks to a few champions, cinephiles and preservationists, we haven’t lost these tremendous films. 

             

Stolen moments: Bicycle Thieves

By 1948 the war was already three years gone, yet Italy stills looks exhausted—back then, as today, the process of recovery could seem endless. Life went on, grudgingly, chaotically. So in some tattered, flaking, sun-beaten suburb, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) emerges from a mass of jobless men to accept employment pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth. Any work’s to be envied, regardless of how menial, and his peers are far from congratulatory, especially since they all know Antonio doesn’t possess the one item required for the gig: a bicycle. But Antonio rushes off to find his wife Maria (Lianella Carrell), who solves the problem easily enough. She sells their bedclothes. We can sleep without them, she says. The money the sheets gain from the pawnbroker is just enough to get Antonio’s old Fides out of hock.

Antonio’s new career however is short-lived. His Fides is stolen. We were waiting for this, of course, the pay-off on the title. But the pay-off isn’t complete until Antonio and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), a shoeshine boy, have scoured the city streets in search of the thief, and finally, out of pure desperation, Antonio himself becomes a thief. This is the most persuasive point of the movie, that we are all potential bicycle thieves, subordinate to the vagaries of money, opportunity, and luck. Antonio’s story is famously simple: guy loses bike, guy tries to get bike back. Yet the story of Bicycle Thieves lies not just in Antonio’s actions but in the faces, gestures and voices of everyone he encounters, crowds of mostly ordinary, equally struggling people who collectively alternate between moments of solidarity and mercenary measures. The movie starts with Antonio emerging from a crowd and by its end he’ll vanish into the crowd once more. One of my favourite things about Bicycle Thieves is its ambiguity as to whether that crowd is meant to offer any consolation.

Vittorio De Sica directed several films that would become central to the movement known as Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves chief among them. It was shot mostly in real locations, mostly under natural light, with non-professional actors—though their performances are certainly theatrical, you might say very “Italian,” nonetheless. The movie spoke of banality, drudgery, fleeting pleasures, and simple tasks, yet there’s much diversion, and there’s tremendous visual poetry in Carlo Montuori’s fluid camerawork, the images of bikes and ladders flooding the streets, the busy market place, the chorus of street-sweepers, and in an especially memorable scene, men running to take shelter from a downpour while carrying gramophones. De Sica finds beauty in hard times. Some viewers grumble about the aestheticization of poverty, but I’m more concerned with the romanticization of naïveté. I hope I’ve made it clear, should it need repeating, that Bicycle Thieves is of monumental historical importance and is a pretty great movie. The resigned finale, with Maggiorani's speechlessness, is terribly moving. But it’s also a movie that strains a bit for my taste. It’s tough to make a fully fleshed-out story when the story’s trying so hard to make a point. It’s noble to speak for those who have no voice, but it’s precarious too.

It’s instructive to compare Bicycle Thieves not only to, say, the work of Roberto Rossellini, that other great, far harsher Italian neo-realist most famous for Rome: Open City (1945), but also to other movies with similar themes and tactics. Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (50) depicted impoverished kids in Mexico City, but it eschewed the sentimental, embracing petty cruelties and perversion, imbuing characters with greater specificity and greater possibility. Charles Burnett has paid tribute to Bicycle Thieves as a formative influence, but Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (77) portrays the plight of Los Angeles’ downtrodden with far more idiosyncrasy, humour, and personal vision. The Dardenne Brothers, in movies like L’Enfant (05), revitalized neo-realism’s task-oriented narrative structures through a distinctly dogged, rivetingly relentless mise en scene. Most recently, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (08) used the premise of a girl search for a lost dog—a premise superficially similar to De Sica’s Umberto D. (52)—to comment on the status of the non-upwardly mobile or economically disadvantaged in contemporary America. While actually watching Wendy and Lucy I was completely immersed in Wendy’s personal, immediate story—its commentary on the larger social issues started to sink in only later on. By contrast, while watching Bicycle Thieves, for all of its marvels, I could rarely forget that the movie was building a thesis.