I. The First Beauty Rome is the first (and perhaps the only) Beauty in La Grande Bellezza. Artists, editors, mobsters, magicians, and businessmen are drawn to its splendor and immortality. Classical ruins only become more beautiful over time; immortality is beauty. Regret for the past, nostalgia, is beautiful. Rome was not always Italy’s most populated…
Alice Rohrwacher, as shown by her lovely first feature film, Corpo Celeste, and her latest, The Wonders, is a first-rate filmmaker and thoroughly original storyteller. Her films convey confidence in her work, ability and subject matter, a sense of real wonder for the world, and a compassion for people, especially young women. The Wonders, while…
In an early scene, Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) and her American husband, Andrew (Michael Craig) drive through Volterra. Volterra is the Tuscan town she calls home and to which she returns for the dedication of a park to her dead father, a distinguished scientist killed in the camps at Auschwitz. Volterra was also an important Etruscan…
In many ways, director Guido Anselmi is just a grown-up version of Fellini’s earlier I Vitelloni. He is absurdly if charmingly irresponsible, but without a hint of malice (to his credit the understated Marcello Mastroianni doesn’t try too hard to elicit our sympathy). For at least five months he has been working on a high-budget…
While Teorema is difficult for me to watch (talk about disrupting the bourgeois expectation of linearity), I adore its dreamy quality. Dreamy because of the unhampered Milanese bourgeois life, because of the random, misplaced, but inevitable sexual encounters which take place in different rooms, the gliding cinematography, the regal silences, and the uninhibited gentleness and…
Part social critique, part melodrama and entirely thrilling, this is probably one of Pasolini’s most mainstream and “linear” films, much closer in theme and feel to his Italian neo-realist peers. As with many of these films, the sacrifices the women make for their men lead to tragedy but, more important, serve to illustrate their fearlessness…
One of my favorite films in PPP’s oeuvre, this was very moving to watch on the big screen. This wonderfully-restored 35mm version has lost none of its power, its wonder, and its faith. I am not particularly keen on biblical films, with the notable and unapologetic exception of Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. These films…
