L'amour à la ville

Antonioni goes deep and examines suicide caused by heartbreak. Fellini verges on his strange world. Risi lampoons the dance halls. Zavattini goes neo-realism with the love of a mother to her child. Lattuada deals with lust and perversion with bouncing breasts, swinging hips and eyes popping out of their sockets. Fellini is the most interesting one.

This film is included in Parker Tyler's "Classics of the Foreign Film," a seminal book published in the 1960s (perhaps updated since then). I saw it for the first time recently through a videotape available at a local university. The film captures aspects of 1950s Rome fairly well, the best segment concerning a Sicilian woman who, having a baby boy out of wedlock, cannot pay for the child's care due to her inability to obtain work. Out of desperation she abandons the child in a park. He is rescued and taken to an orphanage where she tracks him down, admitting to being his mother. Though she is arrested for abandoning the child, the public and court absolve her of guilt due to understanding the situation she had been in. She then becomes a nurse to care for children. If only life had been/was like that. This segment certainly wins in depicting the difficulty of illegitimacy in those days, especially in a very traditional society. Then again, Italian and European cinema were more mature about such things than was Hollywood.

Six separate episodes: would-be suicides discuss their despair. A provincial dance hall. An investigative reporter posing as a husband-to-be. A young unwed mother. Girl-watching techniques of Italian men. A glimpse into prostitution.

The anthology film is hard to do, especially with a multitude of directors, each with their own style. But it seems to be something the Italians did well, which makes great sense in retrospect. Though they could not have predicted DVD in 1953, they might have known that a bigger name (Fellini) would draw audiences and expose them to others.

Is this New Wave, or is it neo-realist? I feel like it's on the cusp. Being post-war and using many real people as actors, it tends to have that realist quality. But, there are enough quirks (such as the cartoon soundtrack of the final chapter) to make it a big more New Wave. I don't know.

An omnibus film conceived of by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini as a sort of neorealist film magazine telling the God's honest truth about love in modern (Italian) cities.

I think these European arthouse omnibus films tend to be very uneven, and this is really no exception. Carlo Lizzani (future director of some pretty kick ass poliziotteschi) and Michelangelo Antonioni turn in a couple of really dreary talking heads segments on prostitutes and suicide. Dino Risi livens things up a bit with a light hearted look at a dance hall.

Not at all surprisingly, Fellini completely steals the show with a delightfully unrealistic segment about a reporter going to a marriage broker to find a wife for his friend who thinks he's a werewolf. Zavattini and Francesco Maselli direct the second best segment, a fairly touching and tragic depiction of a single-mother unable to find work and living on the streets with her infant son. (This is very reminiscent of films he wrote for others like "Umberto D.")

The less said about Alberto Lattuada's segment the better.

So does the film work? Yeah ... but because it's conception is all that good. It was meant to be issue #1 of a series of film magazines on different topics. No others were made, which is not all that surprising since the film works to the degree that it ignores this idea and does it's own thing.

It is not a film for everyone, it will be understood and appreciated only by very sensitive people. Dino Risi with the dance, "Paradiso per tre ore", and "Agenzia matrimoniale" by Federico Fellini, are the best. "Storia di Caterina" by Francesco Maselli, very sad. Sad also "Tentato suicidio" by Michelangelo Antonioni. And, in the last episode, "Gli italiani si voltano" by Alberto Lattuada, we see that the Italian women of the '50s were not only more elegant than they are today, but also much more beautiful. The actors, with only about 3 exceptions, all unknown, are in fact non-professionals, real citizens playing themselves, and they are exceptional. In the last episode, that of Lattuada, the great director Marco Ferreri appears as an extra. Music by the great Mario Nascimbene. 20 stars! Ah, I can't give it 20, only 10 then.