|
The "honorable pact with solitude" (Gabriel García Márquez), un vecchio in his demolished Roman apartment. Elderly pensioners protest in the streets and are dispersed by police jeeps, among them, wizened but dogged, is the eponymous ex-civil servant (Carlo Battisti). On the verge of destitution, he still sneaks his faithful mongrel a plate at a local soup kitchen, to the irritation of welfare matrons. His landlady (Lina Gennari) fancies herself a soprano and threatens eviction, he stands his ground: "She's hoping I'll die, but I'm not going to!" A geezer's cosmic lot, his bed is rented to indiscreet lovers, a restful night eludes him. Food and shelter at the hospital ("better than a hotel," cf. Una Breve Vacanza), he dresses to the nines before hopping onto the medic's gurney. Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece of existential drabness, a theorem of misery and an act of commiseration. The marble columns outside the courthouse are cracked, the protagonist stands by them and grudgingly extends a begging hand, at the last minute he flips it to pretend to check for raindrops. Baudelaire's Les bons chiens, glimpses of the gas chamber at the dog pound. Old colleagues have no time for his woes, youth on the other hand lends a sympathetic ear in the form of the pregnant teenage maid (Maria-Pia Casilio), as affecting as Browning's Pippa. (In the purest rendering of Cesare Zavattini's neo-realist credo, De Sica's camera records her arias of stoic dailiness—dragging herself out of bed at dawn, grinding coffee beans in the kitchen, slumping on a chair to close a door with her toe.) Framed in his room through the jagged iris of a smashed wall, Umberto starts to feel the weight of defeat, "it's a little bit of everything." Despair dissolves amidst locomotive steam, hope in the end is, to paraphrase Dickinson, the thing with fleas. Chaplin is concurrent with Limelight. Cinematography by G.R. Aldo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |