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. 

             

The sound of SILENZIO

He could be K. coming to the Castle or Jonathan Harker paying a visit to Count Dracula. Just a man on an unusual sort of business trip. But the ever-so-cordial Mr. Gilderoy (Toby Jones, offering countless gradations of tempered disgruntlement) seems even less assuming than those unlucky literary forbearers. He is an English sound engineer come to Italy to commence mixing on a giallo film entitled The Equestrian Vortex —we are somewhere in the 1970s. This is not a horror film, Gilderoy is told—it’s a Santini film, Santini being the name of its director, a manipulative schemer and playboy of questionable talent. Whatever the case, Gilderoy just wants to do his job, which he clearly loves, and get his remuneration and travel reimbursements. But however touchy-feely these Italians may be, they seem alarmingly hesitant to cough up the promised cash. All Gilderoy can do is keep asking, keep working, and try to keep his head together.

Berberian Sound Studio is the second feature from English director Peter Strickland. It’s something of a horror film too, though the more time its protagonist spends on The Equestrian Vortex, the more Berberian Sound Studio begins to resemble a vortex itself. Gilderoy immerses himself in his work to an unhealthy degree—an alternate title could have been Audiodrome. Not a flicker of daylight penetrates the film, but the light of a film projector flickers away in scene after scene. This mixer’s sense of reality becomes mixed with that of the film he’s mixing—a film we never actually see. Mind you, while the film’s images are gorgeously lit and framed—images of foley artists massacring watermelons, of unhappy actresses overdubbing screams, of beautifully designed analogue gear in fetish close-up—we don’t really see much. What matters is what we hear, a meticulously textured sonic world slowly slipping away from the orderly and coherent until it shoots down an aural rabbit hole from which the film never returns.

Strickland has said that Berberian Sound Studio was inspired by music, specifically that of Nurse With Wound and Broadcast, who made the film’s excellent score. This comes as no surprise, not only because sound is central to the film—it’s literally the central word in the title—but because this film/object is less about telling a story than it is about the cultivation of a certain aesthetic/psychic space for the audience to inhabit. Watching Berberian Sound Studio so as to find out what happens next is probably not going to lead to a very satisfying experience—Inland Empire feels tidy and conclusive by comparison. Yet the film’s fascinating and often funny milieu is depicted with tremendous affection and detail. It is infused with a love of tape and moving parts, an interest in aspects of filmmaking rarely glamorized or dramatized, and an understanding of the peculiar, transitory relationships that form between the diverse artists and technicians that come together at various stages of production. I didn’t mind that Berberian Sound Studio didn’t really go anywhere, per se. I was happy to surrender to the creepy allure of this place for a time, and to heed the film’s most insistent visual refrain, an image of a flashing red sign that reads SILENZIO. Silence the part of your mind that wants any of this to make sense, and allow yourself to get lost in the hermetic realm of Berberian Sound Studio.    

       

Al the names: multi-monikered Italian horrors bathe Barbara Steele in blood, wall Lucia Bosé in stone, dub everybody into other languages, badly

Visiting the local video store with a fresh hankering for horror I discovered a number of recent DVD releases showcasing a subgenre I’ve previously neglected to dig very deeply into: the Italian horror films of the 1960s and 70s. Which inevitably leads to a lot of castles, a lot of Barbara Steele, and a lot of lousy dubbing. I’m fine with the first of these attributes, positively delighted about the second, but not so big on the third. I’ve watched an unhealthy number of movies in my life and learned to groove with a great many conventions that initially put me off, but lousy or excessive dubbing, whether in low-budget chillers or in the films of Fellini, Pasolini or Pontecorvo—the Italians apparently have an endless tolerance for this—has always had a numbing effect on me, washing whole movies with a layer of technical artifice and incongruity that keeps me from investing as fully as I’d like to. I’m not sure if any of the films below helped to cure that entirely, but watching people get whipped, dissected, bitten and burned alive does go some way toward distracting one from such niggling annoyances.

When listing the commonalities between the bulk of Italian horror films, I should also add alternate titles, of which there are usually a good half-dozen for every film. I’ll try to stick to the ones most commonly used. Previously available only on an ultra-crappy disc, Nightmare Castle, aka The Faceless Monster, aka Lovers Beyond the Tomb or Amanti d’oltretomba (1965), has been restored and newly released by Severin. Deliciously perverse and intriguingly ambiguous, its narrative of infidelity, bad science and cursed legacies proves richer than its recycling of gothic tropes might imply. There are two central locations, the castle of the title and its adjoining greenhouse, the first being a place of decrepitude and rot while the second is fecund and sensuous. It’s in the greenhouse that Lady Muriel Arrowsmith (Steele) trysts with her stable hand David (Rik Battaglia). But it’s in the castle dungeon that the lovers, chained to the wall, are forced to endure the torments of Muriel’s scientist husband, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller). Echoes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover abound, but erotic or class transcendence is swiftly squandered in the name of jealousy, sadism greed.

Having disposed of his wife, Stephen can only inherit Muriel’s fortune by marrying her mentally ill sister Jenny (again, Steele), whom he takes in and begins to model after Muriel with a hint of the necrophiliac drive of Vertigo’s Scotty. Jenny takes to the game so well that she begins dreaming of meeting a lover in the greenhouse, and uncovering the truth about her sister’s demise. As directed by Mario Caiano and scored by a young Ennio Morricone, Nightmare Castle is pleasingly thick with monochromatic gloom and doom and benefits tremendously from Steele’s effortlessness with swinging from positions of power to unease and terror. Those huge eyes hold so much.

Unfortunately, neither Steele’s talent nor her strange beauty are able to help She-Beast, aka Revenge of the Blood Beast, aka Satan’s Sister or La Sorella di Satana (66), now available from Dark Sky Films. Written and directed by British filmmaker Michael Reeves, it starts promisingly with a riveting expository prologue about a community gathering to torture and kill a witch—clearly echoing the prologue of what perhaps remains Steele’s greatest achievement, Mario Bava’s legendary Black Sunday, aka The Mask of Satan or La Maschera del demonio (60). It then quickly succumbs to a wildly uneven contemporary tale of British tourists on holiday in Transylvania, a place where nearly all the locals are impoverished inbred dolts and staunch communists, spouting lines like “Privacy breeds conspiracy!” and “I have petitioned the government for new wallpaper.” The main problem here is really just that She-Beast can’t quite decide if its horror or comedy, though anyone watching can clearly determine that it should have opted for the former—the high-speed, Keystone cops gags are woefully limpid.

A far better investment in Central European vampire lore arrives in the shape of Legend of Blood Castle, aka The Female Butcher, aka Bloody Ceremony or Ceremonia Sangienta (73), slyly directed by Spanish veteran Jorge Grau and now out on a new disc from MYA. No Barbara Steele this time around, but instead we get Lucia Bosé, who some of you might recognize from Death of a Cyclist (55), which was released last year by Criterion in a special edition. In a sense, Blood Castle is a story of marital renewal, albeit of a sinister and myopic sort. In this heavily extrapolated retelling of the story of Elizabeth Bathory, Bosé plays the Countess with surprising texture and sympathy, despairing for the aging of her flesh while her husband only gets excited by watching his falcons rip apart their prey, and by the unfulfilled possibility of sex with peasant girls. When he dies and returns as a vampire, the couple discovers a new kind of partnership in which he finds pretty virgins to kill and drains their blood for the Countess to bathe in, an ostensible formula for rejuvenation that Grau does little to make seem like more than a delusional effort. The real Bathory was said to have been responsible for over 600 deaths before being sealed up behind a brick wall for the rest of her life. Bosé doesn’t get quite that far, but her reign of terror is still pretty impressive, thanks especially to Grau’s graceful camera work, hampered only by some pretty clumsy editing and a few rather dated looking zooms.

No signs of life: Angels & Demons

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is the Indiana Jones for lapsed Catholics and New Agers who buy their books at the airport, the redeemer for every suburban conspiracy theorist certain that the truth is out there if you just follow the signs sprinkled across the globe by the Elders. Langdon should probably be president, or at least running the space program, but he contents himself with his humble post at Harvard, patiently waiting for his petitions to inspect the Vatican archives to get approved.

Angels & Demons opens with a dead pope, some stolen secret antimatter on the verge of blowing up a substantial chunk of Rome, and the return of the Illuminati, still pissed off after succumbing to Vatican atrocities back in the 17th century and promising to murder the four favourites to assume the Papal throne in a matter sufficiently baroque to get Thomas Harris salivating. This is a job for Langdon, who finally gets his coveted tour of the Catholic classifieds and leads the mission to smoke out the bad guys with the help of a sexy Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer). 

But who will help writers Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp adapt Dan Brown’s mega-selling sequel to his mega-selling The Da Vinci Code? Whether taken from the source material or their own doubtlessly numbed imaginations, the pair has spawned the most audaciously awkward—and seemingly endless—expository dialogue this side of Underworld: Evolutions, while fashioning Langdon into a formidable fountain of redundancies. And who will help Ron Howard, a director capable of rendering even giant explosions fantastically boring, who himself possesses an unholy knack for redundancy?

Brown’s tale is a genuine feat, a mind-bogglingly elaborate hybrid of fanciful imagination and inconsistent baloney, replete with a climactic reversal hoisted up via hysterically implausible detective work, such as Langdon and the Italian’s stumbling upon a surveillance video recording of the heavies helpfully explaining the nefarious plan, all of it ostensibly elevated into the realm of social commentary by constant discussions about the tensions between science and religion, including boilerplate arguments between extras about stem cell research. Howard and company lack any critical distance from Brown’s hokum, squeezing out this wearyingly overlong thriller, sleeping soundly with the knowledge that the books’ legion of fans will come regardless. “Faith is a gift I have yet to receive,” Langdon says in one of his more lucid moments. But who needs faith when you’ve got box office gold?

Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.

Bawl in the family: Rocco and his Brothers

There is pulsing through Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli), Luchino Visconti’s celebrated 1960 epic drama, a towering force as wild, forbidding and fearsome as it is transfixing. That force is called family.

Based on the novel by Giovanni Testori, this story of five brothers and their newly widowed mother transplanted to Milan from the rural Italian South, at nearly 3 hours, moves, explodes and engages with tremendous energy. The film’s vitality emerges from the accumulation of several talents working harmoniously at the peak of their powers. Giuseppe Rotunno’s restless, roaming camerawork, especially in the protracted close-ups or spectacular exteriors, such as the massive street brawl or the cathedral-set lovers’ break-up; Mario Serandrei’s masterful editing, with sharp transitions that catch you off guard before hurling you into some new, unexpected scene, sweeping confidently across the tale’s broad chronology; Nino Rota’s jazzy, often detached but never glib music that makes menace weirdly seductive; the international cast of actors, deeply committed and nimble enough to shift convincingly from tender nuance to grand opera in a hastened breath: everyone involved contributes something substantial to the film’s overall power. But I think what truly makes all these elements gel, a unifying vision that we should probably attribute to Visconti, is an acute, mythical understanding of the fathomless potency of blood ties in determining the fate of the characters.

Upon the arrival of the Parondi family in the spectral, snow-covered Northern city, clashing loyalties are already wreaking havoc: a few words construed as disrespect launch an instant shouting match and mutual antipathy between the Parondis and the future in-laws of the eldest Parondi son Vincenzo (Spiros Forcás). Soon after, the charming, thuggish Simone (Renato Salvatore) takes up boxing, womanizing and petty theft seemingly all at once. After a stint in the military, Simone’s younger brother Rocco (Alain Delon) follows him into the ring and, in an act that will later spell disaster, takes up a quiet romance with a smart, beguiling prostitute named Nadia (the superlative –and sumptuously leggy– Annie Girardot) who was Simone’s girl of two years previous. As stray caustic elements spin into increasingly closer proximity, Rocco and his Brothers builds to its climax on waves of violence and toxic moral perdition, culminating at a scene of unbridled emotion, a well-calibrated frenzy of weeping and hollering that feels less like the indulgences of some fine actors than like an impotent purging, an attempt to redeem unforgivable crimes through the ecstasy of sheer, manic volume. It’s like something out of Wild Kingdom. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

Though Visconti was once heralded among the masters of cinema, in the 30 since his death his name has fell from the place it once held near the top of the heap. It seems safe to presume that a revival of Rocco and his Brothers will likely find a new audience with limited knowledge of its director’s career and reputation, which I’d argue is a blessing. To come to this film without prior knowledge of Visconti’s role as an affluent Marxist or founder of neo-realism is to come to it freed of a burden that can only hamper a more fluid, fresh reading of the film.

Case in point: after my own riveted viewing of Rocco and his Brothers I prepared for this piece by reading Bosley Crowther’s 1961 New York Times review. He writes: “there is in this strong and surging drama of an Italian peasant family's shattering fate in the face of the brutalizing forces of unfamiliar modern city life a kind of emotional fullness and revelation that one finds in the great tragedies of the Greeks.” By tracing a Leftist tradition from Steinbeck to Visconti, Crowther renders the Parondi clan as being above all victims of a modern capitalist-industrial urbanism –which strikes me as a hell of a stretch. Perhaps it’s my own baggage –my father is also of poor, un-educated, Mediterranean, hot-blooded and rather oppressively loud folk– but the root of the Parondis tragedy seems to reside all too clearly in cultural traditions that predate Crowther’s point of reference. The city and its corrupting elements play a crucial role, but nothing in the film strikes me as being more flamboyantly destructive than its titular fraternity of pathologically misogynists, lorded over, somewhat ironically, by a matriarch that will not suffer any threats to the singular sovereignty she inhabits in her family. In plain terms, these guys are serious mamma’s boys, and mamma is one formidable figure.

Unsurprisingly, the theme of the family as agent of disaster isn’t especially popular in movies, but when it arises in the hands of artists who know the territory, it can make for masterpieces. Rocco and his Brothers reminded me of the Godfather trilogy, with Rocco himself bearing a striking resemblance to Michael Corleone, the family’s saviour who becomes corrupted by the very poisons he tries to exorcize from his family. In that film, the judgment of the father replaces the clinging grasp of Visconti’s mother, but either way, these films thrill us with stories that come with a clear warning: beware the elders that close off the forging of your own paths in the name of family pride, because once ensnared, every time you try to get out, they pull you back in.