|
Dostoevsky all'italiana, an illusion inside a dollhouse. Murnau's big city at the onset, just around midnight when the bus pulls into the Esso station, doors close and signs shut off as the humble clerk (Marcello Mastroianni) gets to them. A strange realm, virtually a ghost town after hours yet a jumpin' joint on the right evening with a busy jukebox. On the bridge is the maiden (Maria Schell) full of tears and grins, "either ecstatic or desperate" but always a fairy-tale heroine. Her old guardian is a blind grandmother tickled by a night at the opera, the tenant she fell in love with (Jean Marais) was a film noir fugitive, one year later and she's still waiting for him. "Una storia assurda," says her new suitor, "una storia banale," says she, three nights bring them together. "Perfect. I hope he takes his time." A kinship to Minnelli (The Clock is a clear antecedent, Bells Are Ringing an abstruse successor) for this lustrous turning point in Luchino Visconti's marriage of verisimilitude and artifice. (As a shrouded prostitute haunting the river, Clara Calamai might be the specter of neorealismo.) Fantasy and truth, past and present in continuous play: Schell crouches by the corner of the frame in her dilapidated home and the camera turns a 45° pan to usher in a flashback, the same house now rejuvenated. Sudden downpours and creamy fog and falling snow inside Cinecittà sets purposefully too cramped for the characters' emotions, a hermetic mise en scène that finally explodes at the Nuovo Bar—19th-century romanticism meets the raunchy thrust of Fifties rock 'n' roll and Mastroianni responds to the gyrations of a slim-hipped beau with a sublime onslaught of Jerry Lewis spasms. An important film for Jacques Demy and James Gray and any other director with faith in the happy ending, "just not the one you envisioned." Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |