Three films by Luchino Visconti
by Douglas Messerli
[ filmreviews ]
Love, death, and transfiguration
In Luchino Visconti’s 1960 melodramatic film, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) - a work I saw for the first time the other day - the first scene portrays the arrival of Rosaria Parondi and four of her sons from the south of Italy to Milan, where they suddenly intrude upon the celebration of Rosaria’s fifth son, Vincenzo, and his fiancée, Ginetta, at her family’s home. Despite Rosaria’s insistence throughout the film that she is concerned only for her boys, it is quite clear that she has no compunction for destroying Vincenzo’s marriage plans and in demanding that he become the sole supporter of her and his brothers.
A fight inevitably breaks out between the more urbanized (and more cultured) Milanese family and the outsider Parondis, as Vincenzo’s relationship with Ginetta is permanently damaged and temporarily put on hold. It is only the first indication we have of how difficult any expression of love will become for all of the Parondi children as Vincenzo sneaks away to have sex with Ginetta in abandoned structures, Simone, the second eldest, falls in love with Nadia, a prostitute, and, later, Rocco - in love with the same woman - is forced to meet her nightly in an isolated, outdoor spot. Only the second youngest brother, Ciro, seems to have any healthy relationship with a woman, actually visiting her family. Love in this mean Milanese landscape is necessarily hidden and experienced on-the-run.
As several critics have noted, the structure of the film, devoting sections to each of the Parondi sons - Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, and Luca - expresses each of their different ways of coming to terms with the foreign culture into which they have been thrust. But, in some cases, there is a great similarity between them: all but Rocco and his impressionable baby brother Luca want to be assimilated into the new culture. Vincenzo, who has preceded the others, has escaped what he has recognized was a world of closed and limited possibilities, eventually finding a job as a construction worker and, when Ginetta becomes pregnant, marrying her. So too does Ciro desire to find his place in the new society, taking a job at a local automobile factory. Simone (Renato Salvatori), who with Rocco is at the center of this film, has similar aspirations, only in his brutal and ignorant rendering of reality, he has no patience for ordinary work, striving - primarily upon the suggestion of Nadia - to become a successful and, more importantly, rich boxer; but even that seemingly quick path to the good life seems to involve too much time and effort, as he begins, first, to steal, then to gamble and, ultimately, to commit murder. Of these young men, only Rocco (a young and beautiful Alain Delon) has no desire to “fit in,” hoping instead to return to the South and a rural life.
Strangely enough, perhaps because of his near complete passivity - he is often told by women throughout the film to “wake up,” as if he is dreaming away the time he spends with them - Rocco is truly successful in this world, if only through a series of unfortunate events. Perhaps his early job at the laundry is the most pleasurable of his brother’s avocations - at least that is what Simone suggests. But when Simone engages in sex with the owner of the establishment and steals her brooch, which he gives Nadia, who returns it, Rocco is fired. Thus begins a series of saintly gestures he endures for the sake of Simone and the others of his family.
In the military, he sends nearly all of his paycheck home - his mother having pled for him to do so, despite the jobs of her other sons. Having served out his duty, he reencounters Nadia, recently released from prison. Placid in demeanor and accepting of nearly anything in life, he alone refuses to judge Nadia, convincing her instead that she is still young and has great possibility, that she should embrace faith instead of the fear in which she has been living her life.
Their relationship is one of near innocence, despite her past, as she seems to be transformed by Rocco and his belief in her. We have already seen, however, that in this bleak urban setting, love has little room to grow, particularly for a blinded cupid. Simone, whose boxing career has taken a downturn, has joined up with ruffian friends, who play Iago to Simone’s Othello, egging him on to do something about Rocco’s and Nadia’s illicit meetings. In one of the most brutal battles between brothers ever staged, Simone intrudes upon that couple’s lovemaking, beating Rocco and raping Nadia in front of him to deter any further fraternal engagement with what he evidently perceives as his whore.
Once again, Rocco, despite a developing hate for his brother - a hate he ultimately displaces by agreeing to enter the boxing ring - forgives Simone, convinced that his brother desperately needs Nadia to help him better his life. His abandonment of her has fatal consequences, she returning to alcohol and prostitution, Simone to his brutal pattern of abuse and petty thievery.
The tender-hearted Rocco, who had previously refused to fight, now achieves the success as a boxer that his brother had failed to, which merely increases Simone’s jealousy of Rocco and of all of his siblings. Simone’s desperation leads him also to prostitution, as he agrees to accept the sexual attentions of the boxing impresario Cecchi, ultimately stealing money even from him.
As Cecchi threatens legal action, Rocco once more gives up any normal future by indenturing himself, against the protestations of his two other brothers, to a boxing career for at least ten more years. In a sense, Rocco, in his selflessness, prostitutes himself at a level even greater than Simone and Nadia.
Another winning bout transforms him into a local hero, which the family celebrates - reminding us of that first scene. In a sense, he is now wed, like Vincenzo - to a violent career, however, instead of to a beautiful woman. While the family toasts one another and their neighbors, Simone has discovered the whereabouts of Nadia, seeking her out with the hope that she may return to him. But she, having fallen to the lowest levels of existence and facing, she believes, reimprisonment, reiterates what Rocco has previously called Simone: a “disgusting” beast. Simone is completely undone, stabbing his lover over and over as she pleads for her life.
His return home in the midst of his family’s celebrations, his clothes smeared with her blood, is one of the most poignant and horrific moments of filmmaking, shifting what has been high melodrama into tragedy. As Simone admits to Nadia’s murder, Rocco, lying on the bed as he holds him, howls in pain, suggesting an almost sexual dance of death derived from a near-incestual love that embraces all the sorrow and anger that the family has endured. While Rocco wants only to attempt to hide his brother, covering up the family shame, Ciro, realizing his civic responsibility, rushes off, Rocco and Luca trying to stop him, to report the murder to the police.
Some critics have maintained that Visconti allowed, in these last scenes, for his film to be pulled in two directions: while obviously arguing for the rational assimilation of these figures into the society in which they now live, in his sensitive portrayal of Rocco he presents a seemingly conflicted representation of a nostalgic love for an impossible past. Yet Ciro’s last conversation with his younger brother, Luca, I would argue, makes it clear that if this family is to have any future, it must embrace the new world, rejecting the familial and sexual gender-based priorities of the South. Luca’s insistence that his brother return home represents a spiritual awakening in this family, a simultaneous acceptance of both Rocco’s spiritually-inspired nostalgia [1] and Ciro’s more socially oriented pragmatism.
A long sleep
Winner of the 1963 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, The Leopard is certainly one of the most visually beautiful films ever produced. Visconti's Technicolor evocation of Risorgimento Sicily is perhaps the most cohesive and convincing aspect of this almost languid epic, a vision that easily attracts one to the film again and again. The very beauty with which the director evokes the falling nobility of this lost world is, in part, the subject of the book and film narrative, revealing what is being lost far better than the Prince at the center of this work, Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster), could ever express it.
Don Fabrizio is a sensualist, a lover of the world he inhabits while simultaneously perceiving - perhaps even reveling in - its faults. His discussion of his wife with the local priest, Father Pinone (comically realized by Romolo Valli), is a sad commentary on domestic life; although he has had seven children with Maria Stella Salina (Rina Morelli), he proclaims he has never seen her navel! Of the Sicilian people themselves, the Prince is only too aware of what he calls their "desire for death":
“Sleep, my dear Chavelley, eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is... for death again.”
Visconti's film begins with a living room mass in Fabrizio's villa, interrupted by the voices of servants who have just discovered the body of a soldier upon the estate. Momentarily, news arrives in the form of a letter and newspaper account of Garibaldi and his "redshirts" attack on Messina and Palermo. The news of the attack terrifies Fabrizio's family, particularly in its suggestion that they shall have to abandon their palace, perhaps even escape Sicily or face exile. Fabrizio, however, greets the news with an amazing placidness, calming his family, and arranging his own travel the next day. His ideas about the "revolution" are summarized in his statement:
“You know what is happening in our country? Nothing... simply an imperceptible replacement of one class for another. The middle class doesn't want to destroy us. It simply wants to take our place...and very gently.”
Or as he puts it at another time:
“Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.”
Indeed, it is Fabrizio's sense of inevitability tied up with his noblesse oblige that both protects his family and dooms it to destruction.
Although the Prince accepts the growing tide - he has little choice but to do so - his views are nonetheless radically different from his young nephew Tancredi Falconeri (the dashingly beautiful Alain Delon) who stops by the palace on his way to join Garibaldi's forces, determining to help create a new Italian nation that will mean the nobility's (and, incidentally, his own) downfall. His rash decisions and immature energy are both charming and frightful, setting afire the heart of a lady in waiting, Concetta.
In the end, however, Falconeri is a kind of comic hero, as he and his friends arrive at the end of a brutal battle against the soldiers protecting Palermo. For such a lushly filmed work it is almost shocking to see war up so close, as the rag-tag squadrons of redshirts rush forward with hardly any leadership, to shoot and kill the local forces at random. Most of the citizens support the Garibaldi forces, at one point chasing and running down a local who is said to have been a police informer. Despite his attempts to outrun the crowd, we soon see his body hanging from a nearby post. By the time of Falconeri's arrival there are only a few loyalists remaining, one of who - almost by accident - shoots the young volunteer near his eye, transforming him suddenly into a hero. We perceive that Falconeri, in his all his beauty and bluster, is a man who will take advantage of any situation throughout his life, when, a few scenes later, he shows up in a splendiferous soldier's costume, having abandoned Garibaldi's men for representing the King of Italy's forces.
Fabrizio and his family, meanwhile, refuse to abandon their annual summer pilgrimage to the small town of Donnafugata, a voyage temporarily interrupted by Garibaldi forces, but which is allowed to continue through Falconeri's commands.
Indeed the nephew joins them in their summer retreat, much to the delight of Concetta. Always a realist, however, Fabrizio insists that Concetta will not be suitable as a spouse for his nephew, a man whom, he proclaims, will be a world leader visiting other countries. Such a man needs a brilliant and beautiful woman - most importantly, a woman who comes from a wealthy family, particularly since Falconeri and his mother, despite their roles as nobles, are penniless.
Donnafugata offers up just such a woman in the guise of a local wealthy politician's daughter, Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale). Unlike the pious and disapproving Concetta, Angelica is a lusty and open girl, who shocks everyone at the first dinner party with her absolutely joyous laughter at a story told by Falconeri.
The last fourth of the film is devoted to the couple's romance as they chase about the Fabrizio palace in Donnafugata and attend a grand dinner and dance at the home of local nobility. In this scene, Visconti might be said to have staged the final grand gasp of the Sicilian nobility, with all its beauty and grandeur as well as its silliness and stupidity. At one moment, men and woman brilliantly and elegantly perform the local dances, while at the next we observe a gaggle of young women and girls bouncing and consorting about on beds. Malicious gossip is interchanged with witty conversations, grand dishes served up to sometimes unnoticing guests.
In the novel, the later part of the work is devoted to the death of Fabrizio, but here, in the film, the Prince does not die, but simply grows short of breath and feels ill at the grand event, refusing to eat and leaving the party to walk home alone. In the stunning series of events at this ball, the director reveals all to us: it is the beginning of everything new and the end of all the old.
Details of the experience
By an odd coincidence of Netflix timing, I saw this film, Senso, beautifully restored and recorded by Criterion, on the 145th anniversary, May 27, 2011, of the events that begin the film, a performance of Verdi's Il Travatore at La Fenice opera house in Venice. Wealthy and poor Venetians have gathered along with Austrian soldiers who control the city, as well as a few political provocateurs - relatives of the beautiful contessa Livia Serpieri - who shower leaflets demanding an end to Austrian rule and flowers in the color of the Italian flag upon the audience at the completion of Manrico's cry "To arms! To arms!" As soldiers attempt to suppress the agitators, words break out between an Austrian soldier, Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) and the countess' cousin, Robert Ussoni (Massimo Girotti), who challenges Mahler to a duel.
Frightened for Ussoni's survival, the countess (Alida Valli) seeks a meeting with the Austrian in an attempt to dissuade him from the duel, and is assured by Mahler that the event will not occur. At the close of the meeting she requests her husband to take her home, since she is not feeling well.
The source of this ill feeling, we already suspect, are the sensations aroused by the appearance and bearing of Mahler, whom we have already been told is the talk of Venice women. And soon after the two meet again, with unexpected and truly shocking consequences, as the countess wanders the streets of the violent city with the soldier all night. Any respectable woman would not dare to be out after curfew and would not possibly allow herself to be seen, yet the countess even goes further a few days later, when she shows up at the soldier's barracks in search of Mahler.
Despite her political affiliations, it is clear that countess Serpieri will abandon almost all of her values in search of love. Before long, the two spend days together in a small hotel, using her personal maid as an agent in her deceit.
Mahler, a seasoned paramour, is clearly less than an avid soldier, and seduces the countess partly through his seeming passivity and joy in "the details of the experience of love-making," the quiet beat of the wings of a fly or a moth and other small sensations. The countess, in her first true romance, abandons herself, instead, to the passion, almost losing consciousness in the act, and that is her continual dilemma: she has lost all sense of who and what she was. She no longer has a past.
When Mahler fails to meet her the next day, she again appears at the barracks, and is ready to reveal all to her husband. But the young man to whom she rushes, when told by the maid that someone has visited her, turns out to be her cousin, returned from exile, not Mahler. Her husband, who has followed, is accordingly relieved to discover someone he knows within rather than a stranger, a possible lover.
Ussoni gives her a box containing all the partisans' funds for safe keeping, as war between the Austrians and the nationalists, led by Garibaldi, breaks out. Ussoni and others lead the fight in the north. The countess and her household, meanwhile, retire to their country manor for protection. But the war has reached that area as well, Franz Mahler showing up her bedroom late one night.
At first, it appears that she has quelled her passion. "This is not Venice," she declares again and again, as if saying it were a incantation. Through trickery and deceit, however, Mahler wins her over, and before the end of the night has joined her in bed. The countess is now determined to hide Mahler in the granary, but when gunfire breaks out nearby, the men rush to see it better from the granary windows, the countess following in fear of her lover's discovery.
Mahler turns up again in her bedroom, having been served breakfast by her maid. We know the inevitable: to release him from the army and his need to leave her, the countess is willing to give up the partisans' treasure as a bribe for a willing doctor to declare Mahler unfit. The loss of those funds, indeed, ends with the Italians' defeat and her beloved cousin being shot.
Having now lost almost all self-worth, the Countess is utterly distressed when she hears, in a letter from Mahler, that she should not yet travel to Verona to see him. Determined to make the trip, nonetheless, she chances death, arriving in the city, exhausted and covered with dirt. At Mahler's apartment, she discovers a drunken sensualist in bed with a prostitute instead of her former hero. Mahler recognizes himself now as a liar, a traitor, a cheat, and spits out his hate by calling attention to her blind abandonment of all and, most particularly, her loss of beauty.
Like a mad woman, she wanders the streets, finally reaching the Austrian army headquarters, where she reveals Mahler's deceit. The last images of Visconti's film show the former soldier, hands tied behind him, being shot by his comrades.
As many critics have agreed, Senso does not just begin as an opera, but truly becomes one - sans singing and without major heroes. Visconti's characters are grand failures, the husband being a political opportunist, the handsome soldier a petty cad, the countess a deluded woman of the upper class. None are commendable. The heroes of this piece appear in the background, the Italian patriots, and fail in their efforts as well. Yet through his lush camera work, the layers of color revealing both the splendor and decay of this world, Visconti allows us to take in the details of the experience, immersing us in the sensations of sexual lust. It is probably that fact which kept this film from US shores for 14 years after its making, even that redone in English with dialogue by the ardent writers of decadence of the day, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles.
Note
1 It is interesting to note that Rocco tells Nadia of his plans to abandon her for his brother’s sake, a nearly saintly act, upon the parapets of the Duomo di Milano, that city’s major cathedral. [Back]
