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Anna Karenina is explicitly adduced, and there's Florinda Bolkan's resemblance to Jennifer Jones in Terminal Station. Loafing in-laws, boorish husband (Renato Salvatori), a hundred irritations in the morning routine of the Calabrian housewife in Milan, and that's before her shift at the factory. "Bad mood today?" "Yesterday, today..." A case of tuberculosis is her deliverance from utter depletion, the treatment is a respite in an alpine sanitorium, "far from the world." Snowy landscapes replace industrial expanses, the room comes with assorted paperbacks. (She thumbs through Manzoni, a fellow patient recommends Marx.) Fleeting connections, the fashion plate with man trouble (Teresa Gimpera), the bashfully smitten doctor wielding a flashlight (José María Prada), the pixie raging against the Reaper (Adriana Asti). Above all, the young mechanic (Daniel Quenaud) with romantic eyes and hope in "new reforms." Modesty and abandon, awakening and melodrama. "We have to keep our heads. But why do we have to keep our heads?" Plodding tepidly into Petri-Wertmüller territory, one final anecdote from Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. Apollinaire on a striker's banner ("Sickness is the vacation of the poor"), political debates versus inane songbirds on the resort's television set. The city "has a way of knocking the love out of people," the frozen realm above it is a rarefied fairyland, more Lost Horizon than The Magic Mountain. A colleague's wardrobe facilitates the blossoming, the signora who emerges is barely recognized by her visiting relatives and bursts into tears upon receiving news of her full recovery. "Only some madness could resolve our situation." The future is a view from the train, polemics are faded graffiti. With Hugo Blanco, Julia Peña, Miranda Campa, Angela Cardile, Monica Guerritore, and Anna Carena.
--- Fernando F. Croce |