Senso, a Period Film that Feels Contemporary… for the Fifties

I had no idea what to expect from Senso (1954), except that it was an Italian film, which means that it can be pretty unpredictable. So I started watching and it begins with an Opera set in Austrian-Controlled Venice during Garibaldi’s war for Italian Independence.

And it goes on in the most melodramatic way possible from there. While the period sets are beautifully realistic, the story is a 1950s tale in that takes advantage of the social structure (and social unrest) of the era.

Basically, it’s a love story in which a married noblewoman falls head over heels with a young, handsome Austrian Army officer. Since she’s one of Garibaldi’s partisans, the effect is a Capulet and Montague situation, exacerbated by the fact that she’s married.

But the marriage never really plays a role in the question. The love affair is the central question, but those of us who know our Shakespeare, know that it can’t end well. And it doesn’t, but unlike many Shakespearian tragedies, the ending is highly satisfactory, and you feel that things ended as they should, with everyone getting pretty much what they deserved.

Unlike many dramas, this one is entertaining to watch, visually lush and interesting, as it also uses the technique of having the actors speak in several languages and then dubbing according to market. I watched the Italian version, but you could tell some of the actors were off on their own tangent. Since I make a point of watching these in their original language, it’s a little disconcerting to see this.

Anyhow, an interesting piece, and one that I’d probably have missed without the list.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book, Safe and Sorry, is a literary story told in the form of several interlinked short pieces. They tell of life, of love, of adapting to new cultures, and of the possibility of living versus the reality of just existing. You can check it out here.

Fellini, Saved by His Wife: La Strada

Federico Fellini is considered a cinematic legend, and his movie, La strada has been called one of the most influential films ever made. But I’m here to tell you a dirty little secret. The film would have been completely unwatchable had it not been for the wonderful acting of Giulietta Masina.

What I mean by this is that, while the film around Masina becomes unrelentingly bleak in the early fifties Italian tradition, although not as bleak, perhaps, as Ladri de bicicletti, Masina herself smiles in the bleakest parts and that makes you feel “well, that’s all right, then.” In fact despite having Anthony Quinn on screen a good portion of the time, the audience finds themselves waiting for Masina’s expressive little smile…

One might think that that would be barely enough to make this movie decent, but in fact, it’s good enough to make it a highly enjoyable piece which goes by quickly. In fact, Masina not only redeems this film, but actually shows me what Chaplin could have been if he hadn’t insisted on dragging his films down by overdoing the suffering. It’s a performance fo the ages.

As for the rest of the picture, it is, as mentioned, bleak and existential, but it balances out the sweetness and light of Masina’s performance very well. It’s possible that without the bleakness, it wold have been too saccharine and unbelievable. As it is, it works perfectly.

It’s hard to really analyze the underlying themes of this one, as Masina’s performance is the centerpiece and the rest is just along for the ride, but I’m guessing there’s an attempt to address the indifference of life when it comes to everything.

Anyhow, I enjoyed this one, and would recommend it to anyone looking for something very different and a bit strange.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose literary, existential work is collected in Love and Death, a story of several families whose ultimate fate is woven together in seemingly unrelated episodes. You can check it out here.

Another Perfect Movie – Roman Holiday

I always say that Casablanca is the best film I’ve ever seen, and that still stands, but Roman Holiday, in its own genre, is just perfect. It has the perfect actors (Audrey Hepburn is always perfect, of course, but Gregory Peck is good for this one, too), the perfect script, the perfect setting and even–though your heart bursts for it to end differently–the perfect ending.

In a world saturated with romantic comedies constructed on the shoulders of this giant classic, it’s tempting to minimize it, but when you remember it’s from 1953, you can’t really pull it off. This is the one that gave us the formula, moving the genre out of screwball (I LOVE screwball comedy, and Bringing Up Baby is a beautiful thing) and into the modern idiom. Of course, if this one was filmed today, the producers would chicken out and change the ending, because audiences (and humanity at large) no longer expect to be treated like adults.

But get a hold of a copy of this one and watch it. Apart from the lack of cellphones which would have obsoleted the camera stuff, you’ll feel like it was filmed a couple of years ago, and wonder why, with this shining example, romcoms aren’t all brilliant nowadays.

The problem with a movie like this is that it’s tough to find anything to criticize or discuss in depth. The thing I didn’t like was that they clearly say “Introducing Aubrey Hepburn”, when I’d spotted her in The Lavender Hill Mob. That’s it. That’s the extent of my complaints about this one.

Now, as you know, I’m not a professional film critic. I’m just a writer who watches movies from a randomly chosen list for fun. But I can usually spot stuff I dislike. Not this time.

I’m sure professional film critics or people who think we should judge old films by today’s social morality will be able to find fault, but I just enjoyed the hell out of it.

Go watch it. Or watch it again.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own forays into romance are more likely to drop over the edge into steamy crime romance than romcom. His novel Timeless is a good example. You can check it out here.

Umberto D., or the Redemption of Vittorio De Sica

After suffering through the awful, political Ladri de Bicicletti, I’m actually quite grateful that I only learned that today’s subject, Umberto D. was directed by the same man after I watched it.

If I’d known they were both directed by Vittorio De Sicca, I would probably have suffered through Umberto D’, waiting for something unspeakably awful to happen to one of the two sympathetic characters (or to the dog).

But if you go in blind, the film feels strangely positive. Despite the suffering of the old man (the film’s main character) and the pregnant teenage maid who knows she will lose her position and income once her patroness learns about her condition (the film’s most sympathetic character, even if she isn’t the smartest), it somehow feels like everything will be all right in the end for some reason. There’s a certain fatalistic determination to be as happy as the situation permits and not to brood on the troubles that lifts this one above the usual socially conscious films of the time… and makes it enjoyable.

Of course, the message is still there, but as we always say here: there’s nothing wrong with a message, the problem is when the message is ham-fistedly delivered (if you want to learn about ham-fisted messaging, you can look here or, conversely, pick up any diversity-politics-obsessed science fiction book from the 21st century. You won’t enjoy it, but I did warn you.

This one is done well, however, and is easy to enjoy. Just let yourself be transported to postwar Italy and let your mind wander and just enjoy the texture of the place. The plot is simple enough that you won’t miss much. I linked to the film on YouTube above (that one has English subtitles). I recommend it.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a wild romp through the Ural mountains pursued by monsters. Genetically modified dinosaurs, mutant giant arachnids and monsters in human form make it a deadly adventure. You can check out Test Site Horror here.

Ingrid Bergman was Taller than Everyone Else

Read the title of this post and remember that the review it entitles is supposed to be about a great, unforgettable film. The title tells you exactly the thing I found most interesting about this movie.

I’ve watched a certain amount of Roberto Rossellini’s filmography, which you can read about here and here, but Europa ’51 was a particularly interesting film to me because it was the first of his that moved away from war-related neorealism to look at a slightly more melodramatic subject.

I expected this to be a crazy celebration of life… or something. But it seemed like a film that wan’t entirely certain as to what it was trying to say and for that reason, lost its capacity to be memorable. It isn’t as dense as other melodramatic films. It isn’t as annoying as other films with political content. Even though it kills a child almost at the very beginning, it is neither particularly sad nor uplifting.

Apparently, Rossellini wanted to create a deep religious allegory, but if you want to know whether that was successful, you’ll likely need to ask someone who is much more religious than I am.

Yes, there are elements of this film which should make it great. There’s a scene with a cheerful woman who has too many kids and is still happy. There’s some interesting discussion about how work and jobs are glorified by the political movements of the time… but none of that is looked at in depth.

And the ending, which is framed as being one of those colossal injustices of which man, in his eternal blindness, is capable of, just seems like the right way for this particular character to end up… for her own good.

If Rossellini’s intent was to be cooler than everyone else and make audiences shrug, he was a genius. If, instead, he aimed at depth and memorability, he went wide of the mark.

But at least it’s easy to see how tall Bergman is. Maybe not shooting to make her co-stars seem taller is what Rossellini meant by realism.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer who generally writes things that are very much non-realistic. For his realist work, check out Love and Death, a series of linked stories that intertwine the lives of a brilliant cast of characters are they go though pivotal moments in their lives. You can check it out here.

A Couple of Hours in the Eternal City

Every once in a while, I enjoy grabbing an tourist book from my parents’ collection.  You know the kind I mean: the ones sold in shops aimed at tourists and museum gift shops in the major travel destinations.

They’re usually dismissed as fluff for the tourist trade, but the truth is that they are equally often well-researched information sources with unexpected depth.  A couple of years ago, I read the one about Florence which surprised me because it was a spectacularly in-depth history of the golden age of the city and well worth reading.

The Roman volume in my parents’ stash is more in line with what one would expect.  A well-written intro to each major attraction followed by a number of well-captioned photographs.

This particular volume is worth the price of admission because it covers is great detail the sistine chapel and Raphael rooms in the Vatican even though it is less concerned with the rest of the city and pretty much says nothing about Roman history in general.

It serves best as a record of how these paintings looked in the early eighties (they have since been restored) and as a repository of pictures of Rome in the late sixties.  Wonderfully atmospheric, reasonably educational but–confirming the touristy stereotype–perhaps not as much depth as one would prefer.

Anyway, if you collect books on Rome, this one is interesting for the Vatican painting sections.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose love of travel is reflected in all his work, but perhaps most particularly in his ebook thriller Timeless, the bulk of which takes place on Mount Athos in Greece (a monastic hub which even in the modern day doesn’t allow women to set foot on it… which is bad news for the female main character) and southern Italy.  You can check it out here.

A Flat Detective

It should have been a match made in heaven.  Murder mysteries are one of my favorite genres.  Italy is one of my favorite places on earth.  And Sicily is just paradise if you happen to like the same kinds of places that I do.

And yet something failed to click.

The Age of Doubt is a book by Andrea Camilleri in the Inspector Montalbano series.  I had seen the Montalbano series on TV a few years ago, and the series hadn’t really caught my attention (I’m much less of a series watcher than I am a series reader), but this was my first exposure to the author’s writing.

I was unimpressed, mainly because, unlike Fred Vargas’ Adamsberg, I found the inspector to be utterly annoying in his insecurity and strangely adolescent (or perhaps even pre-teen-girl-like) in his emotional responses to pretty much everything going on around him.

At first, I was tempted to blame the translator, as I wasn’t terribly impressed with the prose even before encountering the emotional issues, but once I saw how childishly emotions were rendered, I’m giving the translator a pass.  For all I know, this is a faithful rendering of the original Italian (I can read Italian, but not well enough to judge prose quality, unfortunately).

These are small irritants, of course.  The overall review of this book is that it’s an interesting murder mystery with a melodramatic ending.  I personally found the Inspector’s emotional inner monologue to be an irritant, but others obviously enjoy it.

This series can’t be dismissed, as the late Gardner Dozois famously did every year to the even later Martin H. Greenbergs’ anthologies, as “pleasant but minor”, as it is already a worldwide bestselling publishing phenomenon.  So I’ll limit myself to saying that I prefer my investigators to have different neuroses, treated differently, and leave it at that.  If you prefer a touch of overwrought melodrama, this might be just the series for you.

In my opinion, there are better crime novels among the millions of options out there.  Your mileage may vary.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose crime novel Timeless is a fast-paced, sexy thriller.  You can buy it here.

Stealing Your Happiness… The Most Communist Movie Ever

In watching the 1001 movies in order, I will admit that, every once in a while, you come across a film that makes you ask why anyone would film it.  Did the director hate other human beings?  Did he belong to some sect that believes that humanity can only be saved it it falls into the deepest pit of utter despair?

The answers are never forthcoming, but all I can say is that Vittorio de Sica‘s Ladri de Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) is one of those films.  It took me a couple of days to drag myself out of bed after watching it (OK, I’m exaggerating, but not all that much).

An Italian realist film in the mold of Roma, Citta Aperta, it has little of that film’s historical interest.  This one does have some interesting shots of postwar Rome, and looks at the lives of its citizens, but that’s about it.

What it does have, unfortunately, is melodrama by the trowel-load. Heaping one “woe is me” cliché onto the next, it meanders from suffering to suffering until it ends with a walk-away scene lifted straight from The Little Tramp.  Subtle, this thing was not.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s glance at the checklist.  Father who needs a job to support his young family?  Check.  Supportive wife who does everything she can to help, but is about to fly apart under the strain? Check.  Young boy who puts a brave face on everything, both the stuff he understands and the stuff he doesn’t, and also helps to support the family by working 12 hours at a service station?  Check.  Indifferent world that crushes everyone under its wheels?  Oh, yeah.

Critics, of course, loved it.  They called it the best movie ever, and have been calling it one of the best since (which scares me a bit, because the fact that it lost first place must mean there’s something even more depressing out there).  They called it a very adult movie (which I kind of agree with; kids would be ruined by it forever) and also the most communist movie ever (which is interesting since communism is something more associated with idealistic adolescents than with adults).

Anyway, unless you’re planning to be a film director, give this one a miss and do something less depressing.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose debut novel, Siege, has garnered good reviews (and one notable terrible review).  You can check it out here.

Greater Venice – Or How a Swampy City Dominated the Eastern Mediterranean

Many people can name the great Empires: the Roman Empire, the British Empire and even the Mongols roll quickly from the tongues of people with even rudimentary educations.

But there existed a powerful empire that many people don’t recall offhand, and that empire was the Venetian Empire.  Yes, the tiny city of Venice, mired in a swampy lagoon once possessed the largest trade empire in the Mediterranean with colonies stretching to Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, many of which they held on to for centuries.

This empire was a major actor in the crusades and in the subsequent wars between Christianity and Islam.  The Venetian Arsenal (map above) was the engine that produced most of the ships that sent crusaders on their way as well as the ships that fought–and won–the battle of Lepanto, possibly the most important naval engagement between the two warring monotheisms.

In light of its importance, it does come as a bit of a surprise that so few people know about this particular empire.  I’m a bit of a history enthusiast, but though I knew it had existed, I only recently learned the details about it.

Why is that, I asked myself.

I think there are three major reasons for its lack of fame.

The first is geographic.  This empire wasn’t a contiguous land empire in the tradition of Rome or the Mongols.  People seem to have an easier time imagining this type of structure.  For a far-flung sea empire to live in the imagination, it needs to have good marketing (the sun never sets on the British Empire).

The second and third reasons are psychological and, to the medieval / renaissance mind, possibly moral.  For one thing, the Venetian Empire’s big break came because they betrayed one (possibly two) supposed allies.  Having contracted to take a group of crusaders to the Holy Land, the Doge decided to have them sack Constantinople, an allied Christian city, instead.  The riches from that expedition were the cornerstone of the empire.

For another thing, the “crusades” fought by the Venetians were more about trade routes and money than about religion, despite claims to the contrary on both sides.  The Venetians had no problem with muslims.  They traded with them when it suited them and went to war when it suited them.  Everyone knew this, and for that reason, they never admired the Venetians in the same way as they admired the crusaders who spent time in the Holy Land (even though their own motives were also often suspect).

Anyhow, it’s a fascinating tale and, as you can probably imagine given my track record of buying Folio Society books, it’s one that I absorbed through reading one of their volumes.  This particular tome, The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage by Jan Morris is up to their usual standards and was a great read, mainly because of the colloquial way in which Morris (whose own story is quite interesting in itself) treats the subject: an island-hopping tour of the empire, with the history thrown in in such a way that it hardly intrudes.

This book landed squarely in our Italian period, which also helped make it interesting… even though Venice was only recently grafted on to Italy, and then by force majeure (it took Napoleon himself to do it, in fact).

I would strongly recommend this one to anyone who wants to learn about this somewhat forgotten historical period…  Or to any general reader looking for something a little bit different.  A great read, and one that will teach you a bunch of stuff you didn’t know.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer active in several genres whose most recent science fiction novel is Incursion.  You can buy it here.

 

When Italians Look Back

Our Italianite period continues today with the review of one of the great Italian books of the 20th century.  Now, other than Umberto Eco, I haven’t read that much modern Italian literature but, falling victim to the Folio Society’s beautiful marketing pitch and the fact that their books are utterly wonderful, I decided t purchase The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani.

When reading the description, I expected to find a book very similar to Brideshead Revisited, which I loved.  Instead, I found a book with a darker edge and an utter lack of the poetry of elegy.  Of course, that might be down to the translation, but I didn’t feel that Waugh, as a writer and evoker of feelings, has anything to fear from Bassani.

Nevertheless, the book, which starts somewhat slowly, does become engrossing by the end, when things begin to unravel for the protagonists and the relationships between the young characters become a little more muddied.

Of course, we are told on the first page that the story has a sad ending, as it deals with a group of Jewish families on the eve of the Second World War.  The impact was lessened in my case because it became impossible to fall in love with–or even to truly sympathize—with the mercurial Micòl, the narrator’s love interest.  I generally have no problem falling head over heels for this kind of character, and what is basically a Holly Golightly character should, in my opinion, have been much more compelling.

But if the characters left me a bit cold, the same can’t be said of the setting.  While the city of Ferrara as described by Bassani is unremarkable, the walled home of the titular family becomes a kind of unforgettable wonderland which lives on in memory long after the foibles of the characters are forgotten.

I haven’t seen the film based on the novel, perhaps it is better than the book when it comes to characters–what Micòl lacks in writing can be fixed by any decent casting director (sadly, it wasn’t… just did a google image search)–and I’d love to know what those of you who’ve seen it think.

Anyhow, if you enjoy unforgettable settings or different takes on the Holocaust, this one may be for you.  Others might prefer to read Brideshead Revisited for the elegiac content or Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Micòl done right.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer.  He is the author of Siege, a far future science fiction book which explores what it means to be human–and why that definition matters.  Buy it here!