Film Review
Luchino Visconti takes a wry look at the post-war Italian filmmaking
industry in this dark satire, one of the director's few excursions into
comedy and a film that is all too easily overlooked in the light of the
director's subsequent masterpieces.
Bellissima represents something of
a turning point in Visconti's filmmaking career, the beginning of his
dissociation from neo-realism - which he had served admirably with
Ossessione
(1943) and
La Terra trema (1948) - and the
start of a drift towards a more stylised, romantic approach to
filmmaking, which would attain its fullest expression in his late
masterpiece
Il Gattopardo (1963).
Bellissima belongs to a genre that
is termed
neo-realism rosa, a
lighter version of neo-realism which examines the harsh realities of
life in post-war Italy through the rose-tinted prism of comedy.
Another good example of the genre, released the same year, is Vittorio
De Sica's
Miracolo a Milano (1951).
Luchino Visconti's commitment to leftwing politics (despite his
aristocratic origins, he joined the Italian Communist Party during the
war) made him naturally ill-disposed towards the less moral aspects of
the filmmaking industry, as this film amply demonstrates. Yet
Bellissima is far more than an
attack on exploitative filmmakers and their parasitic entourage; it is
a film whose main preoccupation is the fallacy of trying to build a
life on dreams. Both the central character, Maddalena, and her
husband (appropriately named Spartaco) are obsessed with escaping from
their present poverty-skimming milieu; she wants her daughter to become
a movie star, he wants to build his dream house. Neither has much
hope of succeeding, and yet this doesn't prevent them from ploughing
all of their resources into their futile hobby of building castles in
the sky. Visconti's message is obvious: the problems of the
working classes cannot be solved by wishful thinking.
Bellissima gives Anna Magnani
(arguably the greatest actress in Italian cinema, if not the world) one
of her most memorable roles, that of the insanely deluded mother
Maddalena. The theatricality of Magnani's performance is
perfectly suited for Visconti's heightened, near-operatic form of
neo-realism, but what makes the actress so suitable for this film is
her ability to play comedy and tragedy with equal vigour, and in such a
way that we cannot always be sure which is which. Magnani is
always at her best when she is playing the martyr - who can forget her
tortured performances in Robert Rossellini's
Rome,
Open City (1945) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Mamma
Roma (1962)? - and here she gets ample opportunity to do
that. For the first two-thirds of the film, Magnani revs up the
self-parody motors to near-breaking point as her character goes to ever
drastic measures to achieve her ambitions (threatening to make the
whole of Rome diabetic at one point), but she is back to her usual
mortified self for the final few reels as the deluded woman finally
comes to her senses, ripping our hearts to pieces as she does so.
Given that it deals with timeless themes, it is surprising that
Bellissima is not as well known,
nor as well appreciated, as Visconti's other great films. For
many, a neo-realist comedy is a contradiction in terms, but Visconti
shows this need not be the case and that farce can be just as effective
a medium for exploring the tragedies of human existence as
melodrama. Whilst the director professed a deep sympathy for the
plight of the working class it is only in this film that that sympathy
is fully expressed, with the power to move an audience to tears.
Bellissima is easily one of the
most satisfying and enjoyable of Luchino Visconti's films, but it is
also one of his most poignant, his most honest assertion of his faith
in the nobility of the proletariat.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Luchino Visconti film:
Le Notti bianche (1957)