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The importance of viewpoints (cf. Reed's The Fallen Idol) is accentuated in a tracking shot early on, the four-year-old (Luciano De Ambrosis) pushes single-mindedly onward to the puppet theater in the park while his jittery mom (Isa Pola) glances this way and that for her lover. The morning after her departure is a series of oblique impressions splendidly sketched, half-swallowed sentences and Dad (Emilio Cigoli) unshaven and late for work, gossips knocking at the front door, the couple's empty bed. Adultery, "the bourgeoisie's only drama," Vittorio De Sica guides the young protagonist's discovery of new spaces (a seamstress' shop stocked with decapitated mannequins, a grandmother's cottage, a bustling vacation resort) and new emotions and new traumas. Peeking into the world of grown-ups, he spies on a clandestine couple and the girl gets conked on the head with a flowerpot; on the way back home (aboard Freud's train?), a maelstrom of distorted images is capped by a superimposed face and a pleading word ("Mamma"). She returns but her maternal resolve is no match for the melancholy eyes of the interloper (Adriano Rimoldi), the same frivolous crowd that had encouraged her indiscretion then bathes her in scorn. "Ah, the social whirl... The things people do in its name." The end of summer and the beginning of boarding school, the dazed walk on railroad tracks (Pixote) and the desperate beachfront sprint (The 400 Blows), above all the closeup of the boy (struggling to hang on to a lie, not wanting to hurt either parent) while questioned by the father who already knows the truth. A child's painful maturation is also Italian cinema's, as befits a crossroads between white-telephone polish and neo-realist inquiry. With Giovanna Cigoli, Jone Frigerio, and Maria Gardena. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |