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A remarkable long take exemplifies the method: A servant awakens on the floor of a luxurious chamber and rouses his master, Chancellor Séguier, who has a prayer in bed before moving to his armchair to have hands and feet leisurely washed, about midway through the six-minute sequence his guests are called in bearing news of Blaise Pascal's invention, the world's first adding machine. Roberto Rossellini introduces the mathematician-philosopher (Pierre Arditi) in the corner of an august composition, tabulating taxes with quill pen at hand. Pale and wobbly-kneed, he ardently pours over the most obscure of Desargues tomes while in the barn animals are born. "Your calculations will never rival the beauty of God's creatures." "But aren't these also part of Creation?" Logic side by side with superstition and fear and disease, in other words life in 17th-century France. Witch trials, shattered by torture the accused maid (Anne Caprile) agonizes on a stretcher before black-robed judges, "such things bewilder me." His father the royal intendant of Rouen (Giuseppe Addobbati), his sister (Rita Forzano) and her own journey into the Jansenist convent, his amicable disagreement with Descartes (Claude Baks). "The demon of vanity" and its twin, certitude, against them Pascal wields a syringe to prove the existence of a vacuum, the void to be faced like a mirror. "Man's one true knowledge is to acknowledge that there is an infinity of things beyond his grasp." As opposed to the sense of wholeness in Age of the Medici, a marked metaphysical split throughout. Not so much a biopic as a fugue on the concept of biopics (cp. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), ending with its subject all but dissipating in a candlelit tableau. Rossellini's Diary of a Country Priest, and a close study for Barry Lyndon. "Use your reason, if you have any." With Christian De Sica, Livio Galassi, Teresa Ricci, Bruno Cattaneo, and Giuseppe Mannajuolo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |