Bellissima (1951)
Directed by Luchino Visconti

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.

Film Synopsis

Maddalena Cecconi is a nurse who lives in a slum district of Rome.  Her husband Spartaco barely earns enough to pay the rent and the couple face eviction from their cramped lodgings.  When she hears that the film director Alessandro Blasetti is holding open auditions at Cinecittà studios to find a young girl for his next film, Maddalena does not hesitate to enter her five-year old daughter Maria in the competition.  Even though Maria is too young and shows not the slightest interest in becoming an actress, Maddalena is determined that she will win the contest and squanders all her savings on coaching lessons and a new dress.  She even gives money to an unscrupulous studio hand in the hope that he will improve her daughter's chances, not knowing that he is merely exploiting her naivety.  Maddalena soon discovers that the world of show business is not what she imagined it to be...