tenco

Fairly compelling drama with neat concept. Only thing is that the concept is disconcertingly close tothat of a 1978 series, the similarly titled Accident. Same repeated replay from different angles of a horrific motorway pileup, same structure of flashbacks interpersed with present investigation and unfoldng dramas of those affected, samemix of quotidian and high finance characters, even a similar guilty party fleeing into the woods from the scene of the crash. I liked both, the earlier one a bit more soap opera-like (a major incidental virtue being credits and title music from the folks who provided the same for Terry Nation's 1975 Survivors), this one more thriller-oriented. Not at the peak of deviser Anthony Horowitz's powers but good enough, especially if you haven't traveled this tangled wreck-filled stretch of road before.

Forget the Marie Dressler main plot, elephantine and lumbering as the star (on this occasion: she was great when movies finally allowed her to talk and properly preserve her theatrical identity). Throw out almost everything else, especially the usual Mack Sennett hash joint/beanery-with-continental-pretensions which holds the action and us captive for roughly half the running time, tricking the film out to feature length.

The claustrophobia and boredom these stage-bound scenes induce have the positive effect of making us fully appreciate everything that happens outdoors in lovely underdeveloped 1914 Southern California. The scenes with rascal Chaplin and his lovely accomplice Normand (a beautiful team) hiding out together from the rest of the movie in real locations provide delicious escape and a very different, carefree, style of acting and film-making, which can be reduced to the one wonderful scene (throw the rest away if only five minutes can be preserved) where Charlie and Mabel go to the movies only to find an on screen version of the very scam they've haplessly set into motion and have ducked into the dark to escape. It's valuable documentation of what movie-going looked like in 1914, fascinating in itself, but the comedy raises it higher. Mabel is the kind of audience member who emotes and comments as she watches. The fellow sitting next to her is the stern sort who gets annoyed and says "Shush!" As Chaplin and girlfriend watch further they realize they're seeing themselves, and Mabel can't help but notice and say it out loud (yet silently). As she does so, she and Chaplin, increasingly self-conscious about talking in the theater, notice that the shush-er beside them reveals a sheriff's star as he adjusts his waistcoat. Paranoia sets in and from this moment on klassic Keystone Kops seem to be lurking in the edges of everywhere they dream of transgressing. A lovely vignette and accompanying good bits and pieces.

Riso Amaro is bizarrely and wonderfully paradoxical: a movie that decries and deconstructs Hollywood-style escapism at every turn, and ,yet, is itself as pure an opiate for the masses as is known to Italian cinema.

The closest comparison that occurs to me is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Both fetishize the technical and narrative magic of classic American films, the boundless optimism of the American dream that only soaring crane shots and panoramic vistas filled with casts of thousands (or at least a few dozen) can convey. Both fondly revisit every last genre movie cliche that can be crammed in edgewise. Yet, both are the work of foreigners asserting their alien and alienated status.

If your sensibility tends to dialectical Marxism, view Bitter Rice as a fascinating demonstration and critique of lumpen-proletariat "double-consciousness". If you could care less about such things, dig Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman doing a rhumba, or the lovely exploited riceworkers hiking their skirts above their thighs and wading towards a watery catfight with non-union laborers ---or all the other delirious and visionary standout sequences that add up to Gone With the Wind as shot by Sam Fuller. Amazing stuff.

In a perfect world, this film would be available in the USA. It isn't at the moment. Slap some subtitles on it somebody, please!