Sunday, January 20, 2013

18: Voyage in Italy (a.k.a. Voyage to Italy; a.k.a. The Divorcee of Naples; a.k.a. The Greatest Love; a.k.a. Love is the Strongest; a.k.a. The Strangers, a.k.a. The Lonely Wife – U.K. version; a.k.a. Viaggio in Italia – Original Italian title)


            Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953) is a film that is utterly devoid of memorable moments.  In an attempt to further separate himself from the movement of neorealism that his 1940s films had essentially created, the director continued to move away from social issue pictures and toward cinema’s emerging emotional realism.  As a result, this film, his third collaboration with wife Ingrid Bergman, serves more as a testing ground for his talents in the latter movement rather than a solid or cohesive work.  From a narrative standpoint nothing much happens, and neither Rossellini nor Bergman are yet adept enough working within the emotional realism palette to offset this lack of plot.  
            Bergman plays Katherine Joyce, a woman who’s come to Naples with her husband, Alex (George Sanders) for a holiday and to sell the villa of a deceased uncle.  From the film’s opening they are at each others’ throats, with an uneventful car ride providing the setting for subtle jabs and twists of emotional daggers they seem to have long ago buried in one another’s backs.  They don’t scream obscenities or shout accusations.  To do so would break a code they seem to have adopted without a single necessary word of agreement.
 While the early scenes get the point across that the marriage has all but evaporated, the dialogue doesn’t escape from the performers mouths with the joy it might if the script were better.  Sanders, who could deliver an unassuming but fatal verbal blow better than almost anyone in cinematic history, is kept in his cage, his powers reduced by a screenplay that counted heavily upon the actors’ ability to improvise.  This likely sat well with Bergman, who trusted her husband’s ability to make it work and whose lines would be dubbed in post production as with most Italian films of the time, but Sanders was mortified.  There was a quality of his speech in his best performances that required him to be “in the moment,” and the ADR technique robbed him of much of his panache.
For several days the husband and wife live all but separate lives.  She’s intent on seeing the sights and he’s concerned with socializing, trying desperately to stave off the boredom brought on but what he sees as the unbearably slow pace of Italian life.  They bicker when their paths cross in the villa, with conversations about art and philosophy somehow always morphing into arguments that never quite explode into full on fights.  Rossellini tends to side with Katherine, and uses Sanders – who he had grown to dislike – to paint an unflattering picture of Alex.  By the time he picks up a prostitute in the city we’re hardly surprised, and his declaration that the girl is a “shameless, brazen hussy” seems to fit (while lewd by Hollywood standards of the day) within his standard dismissive tone.  The character of Katherine, alone for much of the film, is established in an even less subtle way, relying on monologues as she drives to and from museums and catacombs.   
(Spoilers Below)       
In these and many other aspects Voyage in Italy is heavy-handed, and as such it becomes predictable in its structure.  Most of the emotional cues, accept for the final one, can be seen from miles off, making them wholly ineffective.  And then there is the final scene.  Katherine and Alex have decided to divorce.  She can’t stand him anymore, and she lets him know it.  Their car is caught up in a religious parade.  They get out and Katherine is swept away into the crowd.  She calls for Alex.  He catches up quickly and the two glance something in the Catholic throng that causes their hatred to melt.  In fifteen seconds of screen time they fall in love again.  This didn’t work for audiences upon the film’s release and it doesn’t work now.
 I applaud Rossellini and his actors for not laying on the romanticism throughout the film, but to bottle it all up for the final shot feels more like selling out the picture’s established emotional tone rather than artistically shifting it.  Exchanges like (Katherine) “Life is so short”, (Alex) “That’s why one should make the most of it” could have been overplayed for schmaltz.  They weren’t, and the film could have stuck to its tonal guns, subtly growing toward a real confrontation or justified reconciliation.  Life is indeed too short to have an unfounded and shallow happy ending tacked on.    

Language: English
Runtime: 87 Minutes

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

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