Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Shoeshine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sciuscià

    Vittorio De Sica (1946)

    Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi), in his early teens, and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni), a year or two younger, are firm friends.  They scrape a meagre living as shoeshine boys on the streets of Rome.  The time is the present, immediately after the end of World War II:  the shoes we see shined are worn by American GIs.  The boys also test ride horses and are desperate to own a horse of their own.  It seems way beyond their means but, through Giuseppe’s elder brother, Attilio (Guido Gentili), they get involved in a scheme to raise cash.  Giuseppe and Pasquale succeed in buying their horse but then find themselves wrongly accused of theft.  (Attilio and an accomplice (Gino Saltamerenda) are the culprits.)  The boys are put in a juvenile detention centre and eventually receive prison sentences.  While they’re in the centre, a misunderstanding makes Giuseppe think he has been betrayed by Pasquale, which brings about a serious rift between them.  Giuseppe eventually escapes from prison with another, older boy, Arcangeli (Bruno Ortensi).  Pasquale is sure where they will have headed.  He leads the police to the place where his and Giuseppe’s horse is stabled but the two other boys and the animal have already gone.  While the police are searching the area, Pasquale absconds.  He finds Giuseppe, Arcangeli and the horse, then, when Arcangeli has run off, sets about Giuseppe.  The younger boy falls from a low bridge and hits his head on the rocks below, it seems fatally.  Pasquale cries over his friend’s body as the police arrive to take Pasquale back to prison.

    Shoeshine was a seminal Italian neorealist film and is generally considered to be a humanistic screen classic.  It left me cold.  I can get some sense of why its unvarnished social critique made such an impact in 1946 but I envy those who, coming to Shoeshine much later, seem able to see it without decades of cinema history blocking the view of the original film.  The final image of the boys’ horse is extraordinary – it looks much more mysterious here than its symbol-of-freedom function in the story would lead you to expect.   But the ranks of unkind, pompous officialdom in evidence seemed to me crude caricatures; more important, I didn’t find the boys expressive.  I realise their playing may have been ‘pure’ compared with junior Hollywood products of the time but I think Vittorio De Sica sentimentalises their innocence.  Their brutalisation in detention consists of looking less clean and a bit less angelic than they did before they were behind bars.   The screenplay was written by Cesare Zavattini, Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci and Cesare Giulio Viola.   The DoP was Anchise Brizzi and the music by Alessandro Cicognini.

    15 August 2015

     

  • The Beaches of Agnès

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les plages d’Agnès

    Agnès Varda (2008)

    The beaches of the title are in Belgium, where Agnès Varda was born and where this autobiographical documentary begins.   In her opening words, she explains that, ‘They say that inside people there are landscapes.  If you opened me up, you would find these beaches’.  Varda made the film as she approached her eightieth birthday (a ‘surprise’ birthday party – inserted midway through the closing credits – provides a brief epilogue).    She’s a nearly continuous voice on the soundtrack and figure on the screen.  The Beaches of Agnès is full of deft visual invention, of witty compositions and colour combinations.  They run all the way from the mirrors set up on the beach in the opening sequence to the collection of differently-coloured brooms – one for each of Varda’s eighty years[1] – which she receives as a birthday present in the postscript.  The exultant cleverness of the design makes the additional layers of humour pretty redundant – I could have done without the nudges of jaunty music and, especially, the bits where Varda takes a few steps backward in the frame to illustrate her going back in time (even though her movement is touchingly uncertain).  She speaks more than once about the tricks and confusions of memory and the narrative is certainly discursive – although the intricacy of the film’s composition dazzlingly refutes any idea that Varda’s artistic mind is anything less than incisively imaginative and clear.

    Varda has had a long and enriching life:  she’s an admired photographer and director; her paths have crossed with those of an extraordinary range of remarkable people, including the prime movers within the nouvelle vague and (as I learned here) Fidel Castro; she now has two children and four grandchildren whom she evidently adores and who love her back.  Short and (in old age) plump, she’s a very engaging presence – like a humorous partridge – but she also exudes sadness and The Beaches of Agnès registers most strongly as a film about loss.   Varda is tearful when she speaks to her photographs of a succession of famous actors (Jean Vilar, Maria Casares, Philippe Noiret, Gérard Philippe et al):  all gone.  She tells us that each of these deaths leads her back ineluctably to the death of her husband Jacques Demy (from AIDS in 1990).  The loss of him is a leitmotif in the story she tells and an evidently raw wound.

    5 October 2009

    [1]  This is from the French phrase ‘avoir xx balais’, meaning ‘to be xx years old’.

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