Paisan: Italian Pick of the Month

I'm not a huge fan of Italian Cinema, or even European, even though my favorite foreign film is Cinema Paradiso (never ever ever watch the Director's Cut, it will ruin your experience forever, and you'll be forced to go to a memory doctor like in Eternal Sunshine to get the memory removed.), which is an Italian film. But I'm going through a lot of old European films to catch up for school and I've come across Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy films. The first one, Rome Open City, literally was made right after the Germans were pushed out of Italy. Then Paisan was made a year later in 1946, when the Allies were still in Italy. As is the case with a lot of post-war European films they used real people to play the parts. So for example in Bicycle Thief, they got a guy who gets off on stealing bikes. In Paisan, he got real American soldiers to play the Americans, and real street urchins to play the street urchins, and etc etc. 

Despite the annoying "realism" of the actors, this was a remarkable war film, perhaps one of the best ever made. And yet it features no battle scenes, and hardly any actual combat. It's mostly about how the soldiers interact with the Italians as the Allies push north through Italy. The film is divided up into different stories, set in sequence. First, when the Allies land in Sicily, then later when a city becomes a military hub, and in the North during the Germans last throes of combat in Italy. The theme through each part has to do with the lack of communication between the soldiers and civilians. The great thing about the structure of the film is that Rosselinni kept all the storylines separate, rather than try to connect them to seem clever, like so many episodic films of today do. There's nothing clever about writing a bunch of separate stories together to make them seem like coincidence. Magnolia, Babel, Crash....these aren't clever or fantastically artistic. The real skill comes from having different stories connect on a deeper level, finding meaning in their unique details, despite taking place hundreds of miles apart and at different times. From the opening sequence when the Americans need a town girl to help them, but only one guy speaks Italian and he leaves. Then they don't care about her later when they think she did them wrong. Compare that to the last sequence, when the Special forces soldiers are fighting alongside the partisans, and still there are some communication issues, but each is willing to die for the other. Each story in between is about the growth between the soldiers and people, and how they get from wanting to kill each other to willing to die for each other. Seeing that transformation provides a deeper connection into what it means to be at war, both for soldiers and civilians affected by it.