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Documentary metaphysics, travelogue epiphanies. "I've never seen noise and boredom go so well together." Italy might as well be an alien planet to the British couple peering through the Bentley windshield, the void of their marriage is promptly confronted by a world with "a complete lack of modesty." She (Ingrid Bergman) is a romantic neurotic and he (George Sanders) wears an armor of condescending irony, their trip to Naples reveals them as strangers to each other after eight years together. A Vesuvius view from the villa, terrace lounge chairs for scanning empty spaces and pondering the difference between poet and fool. Mandolins and songs and heavy sauces, funeral hearses and baby carriages and rocks that smolder and melt. "In a sense, we're all shipwrecked," usual cocktail party chatter. The husband idly pursues an affair, the wife visits the museum hoping for the past's comforting exoticism and instead finds the staring eyes of insinuating statues. Nothing happens and everything happens, a Roberto Rossellini specialty for a turning point in cinema, "no longer bodies but pure ascetic images." The camera is a guiding conscience, the stranded Hollywood stars look anxiously behind it, begging for direction. "Dolce far niente," torpid figures and active landscapes. A real-life excavation of Pompeii ruins is brilliantly folded into the narrative, the exhumation of ancient lovers hits the heroine like a ton of bricks. "Life is so short," she blurts out, mere words to express the abrupt awareness of the weight of the millenniums. Out of the automobile's metallic shell and into the surge of humanity for the wondrous dénouement, the couple separated and reunited amid the turmoil of a religious procession. ("Miracolo," the crowd exults as the shadow of the camera falls on them.) "Are you suddenly getting sentimental?" Rivette in his Cahiers review wonders if there will be a Rossellini school, Kiarostami down the road has the answer. Cinematography by Enzo Serafin. With Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer, Paul Muller, Leslie Daniels, Natalia Ray, and Jackie Frost. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |