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.

Italian Cinema 101: Or how I came to see Robert De Niro's penis

It's true, this week I was privileged enough to see some full frontal male nudity. Not once, not twice, but thrice. And one of those times was Robert De Niro. All three times were in an Italian epic called 1900. Runtime: 311 minutes. Bernardino Betolucci loves him some wang. What he doesn't love is some editing, because at over 5 hours, this mother was long. Regrettably and horribly long. I fast forwarded through a lot of it, which took away slightly from some of the details, but got me through the whole thing. A few of the craziest moments while I fast forwarded, I re-wound and caught them; i.e. when Donald Sutherland kills a cat by head butting it, and when Sutherland kills a kid when he's twirling him around and bashes his head on the wall. Donald Sutherland later gets chased by a mob of women workers, where they impale him with several pitchforks. Between Donald Sutherland's graphic scenes, and the myriad of penis(including prepubescent boys comparing theirs!!!), this was European cinema at it's most cliche. Oh and there was some drug use. The other European films I've been watching were far less graphic. (P.S. The 1900 DVD is unrated, but the original US release was NC-17. If I had known, I would have passed on this one.)

1900 - Don't see this film. Even if you like male nudity. This film was dreadfully boring. It follows the lives of two men born on the same day in the year 1900 in Italy. One, Alfredo, is the son of the Padrone, a land owner baron, and the other Olmo, a illegitimate peasant. Italy was a crap hole for political turmoil, and their lives surround all that, from labor strikes to WWI, to the rise of socialism and fascism. That all sounds pretty cool, and if it followed Sutherland killing kittens and boys, it probably would be. But the film tip toes around most of the action, from Olmo returning from war (and Alfredo not even going) to just showing people upset a lot and talking about the turmoil the country is in. And then a whole lot of random things, like Olmo and Alfredo sharing a prostitute, where we see De Niro's and Gerard Depardieu's penises. It's meant to be at its heart a tale about the rights of workers and class struggle, but when you talk about it more than show it, it defeats the purpose. (And what do penises have to do with class struggle?) The ending comes close, though, after the second war, when the peasants are "cleaning house" of all the fascist, and Sutherland gets his just desserts. It's a tall task to make a five hour epic set around two world wars, social uprising and lots of penis and still be majorly boring. But when you look at the base story, a rich guy and a poor guy who are friends, yadda yadda, just watch Disney's Fox and the Hound and use the extra four hours of your life to do something meaningful, like build a doghouse.
Roger Ebert agrees with me!!!

The Conformist - Somehow directed by the same Italian director that loves penis, this film contained no male nudity!!! (Only a hint of lesbianism and a  flashback that almost results in molestation.) Hooray. (But it was made before 1900, so maybe he thought something was missing from his films.) In 1900, Betolucci uses ham fists to drive his point up your "you-know-what"; i.e. the two childhood friends fight and fight, all the way to the end as old men, when they fight in the fields, all representative of the eternal class struggles. But here, the ham fist comes from the title. The main guy is a conformist. How do we know? The title makes it clear, before we ever see the film.
The plot according to them is of a guy working for the fascist government as a hitman killing enemies of the state. His next target is an exiled professor he had as a student, who according to lots of dialogue, was the man's mentor. Funny, though, in the film the man never shows affection for the professor or any kind of feeling that the man had any lasting impression. Except there is one really nice scene when they meet again for the first time and talk about Plato's allegory of the cave. That discussion sort of mirrors a lot of the themes of the film, as the man maneuvers between the light and dark of his life, as well as the light and dark of the world around him, and around Italy, with the rise of fascism. The film actually is visually remarkable, using light and dark mystically as well as some other remarkable shots. I think this film was very influential to 1970's American cinema, because you see many film elements in this crop up into later films. Stylistically, this film sets the tone for the 1970's, which was a re-birth in American film starting with The Godfather and moving on to other darker and grittier films like Taxi Driver and even into science fiction of the decade.
The Conformist was great, but forgettable. After watching it, I felt like I liked it, but after a week it had basically left all of my consciousness. But in a way, that's what films do, however, it actually may imply that I didn't identify or relate to the protagonist in any meaningful way. I should have. On paper, his story is deep and interesting, and something we all face: being an individual in a conformist world. But the film just wasn't effective enough to reach that deep. Maybe if I saw his penis I would feel differently.