Film review

  • Umberto D

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vittorio De Sica (1952)

    Like Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D is set in early post-World War II Rome.  It begins with a street demonstration, elderly men protesting about their inadequate pensions.  One of the marchers is particularly conspicuous thanks to the little dog accompanying him.  The man is the title character, Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant.  The dog is Flike, a Jack Russell terrier.  At the end of the film, Umberto and Flike are still together but it’s a close call.

    Umberto (Carlo Battisti), employed for thirty years in the government’s public works department, resides in a shabby lodging house.  He’s behind with the rent to the tune of fifteen thousand lire and his landlady, Antonia Belloni (Lina Gennari), won’t hear of part-payment:  she threatens him with eviction unless he settles up in full by the end of the month.  Umberto lives an isolated, uncommunicative existence.  Apart from the odd bad-tempered exchange with the callous landlady, he talks mostly to Flike and to Maria (Maria-Pia Casilio), a maid in the lodging house.  He keeps himself clean and tidy but isn’t in good health and the cold, damp room doesn’t help.  Signora Belloni behaves as if Umberto had already vacated it.  He returns from the pensions protest to discover a young couple in the room, rented out to them for an hour.  After spending a few days in hospital with tonsillitis, Umberto comes back to find workmen redecorating the place.

    A sequence on the hospital ward makes clear that some of his fellow patients are there because it’s a relatively comfortable place to be; although Umberto felt unwell, he may have been thinking on similar lines when he phoned for an ambulance.  If so, the hospital stay is part of a series of increasingly desperate measures that his straitened circumstances drive him to.  In an early scene, he sells his watch to another man.  The latter, who haggles successfully for Umberto to reduce the price, is promptly revealed to be a beggar on the street where the transaction takes place.  Later on, Umberto is himself reduced to begging in public.  He’s so ashamed that he uses his hat to hide his face.  He then has a better idea, getting Flike to sit in a begging position, with the hat held in his mouth for contributions, while Umberto skulks behind a nearby pillar.

    By this point in the narrative, Umberto and Flike have already endured a period of separation.  Maria agrees to look after the dog while Umberto’s in hospital.  On his master’s return home, Flike is nowhere to be seen:  Maria explains that he disappeared when an outside door was left open.  Umberto hurries to the city’s crowded dog pound, where lost or abandoned animals, unless they’re quicklyh claimed, are put down.  He’s ecstatically relieved to find Flike there but Umberto is well aware that he lacks the means to keep either his dog or himself going.  Unable to get a loan from a former colleague or from his ex-boss, Umberto decides to commit suicide, but not before he has found Flike a home.

    He leaves his lodgings, carrying his few remaining possessions in a suitcase.  Wandering through the streets, he comes upon a dogs’ ‘boarding house’ and talks with the couple running it but their inmates look so feral and distressed that Umberto decides against the place.  In a park where they sometimes walk, he offers Flike to a young girl who knows and likes the dog; she accepts the offer excitedly but her nanny says no.  A railway line runs alongside the park; in despair, Umberto, holding tight to Flike, stands in wait for a train that will end both their lives.  Terrified by the noise of an approaching train, Flike panics, wriggles free and runs back into the park.  Umberto follows.  At first, the dog is wary of returning to his owner but Umberto, holding out a pine cone for him to play with, eventually coaxes Flike out from behind a tree.

    In the film’s closing shot Umberto, playing with Flike, recedes into the distance.  This image of survival – the survival of two underdogs – faintly suggests Chaplin’s tramp shuffling away but the effect is bleaker:  the reunion feels like a very brief postponement of the inevitable, for dog and man alike.  Reviewing Umberto D in Sight and Sound in 1953, Karel Reisz wrote that the protagonist’s ‘last gesture does not suggest any practical solution – he still has no money, nowhere to go – but it represents a moral victory, an affirmation of solidarity’.  Since Umberto’s last but one ‘gesture’ was a failed suicide-canicide attempt, thwarted only by Flike’s escape from his master’s grasp, the outcome is a very qualified moral victory – to say the most.

    The film may be less famous than either Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine (1946) but it’s widely admired and was supposedly its director’s own personal favourite among all his films.  The opening street demo is gripping; one later sequence, the unstressed, expressive description of the maid Maria’s early-morning routine, is rightly celebrated as a high point of Italian neorealist film-making.  But Umberto D lacks the momentum of Bicycle Thieves – and that’s not all.  Cesare Zavattini, De Sica’s regular collaborator and one of several writers involved in Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves, gets the sole screenplay credit here.  As with those two predecessors, some of Umberto D‘s cast hadn’t acted professionally before.  Maria-Pia Casilio would go on to work regularly in Italian cinema; seventy-year-old Carlo Battisti, a professor of linguistics, never made another film.  Battisti, although he holds the camera, doesn’t give a nuanced performance; the same goes for Lina Gennari, already a professional actress.  Alessandro Cicognini’s maudlin music is so relentless that it’s counterproductive.

    Most of the emotional power derives not from De Sica’s and Zavattini’s social conscience but from the man’s best friend story.  The relationship of Umberto and Flike completely dominates subplots like Signora Belloni’s forthcoming marriage and Maria’s pregnancy.  (The father-to-be could be either a tall soldier from Naples or a short soldier from Florence – Maria’s not sure which.)  The film was remade, more than half a century on, as a French movie, Francis Huster’s A Man and His Dog (2008), notable for the last film appearance of Jean-Paul Belmondo but which seems otherwise to have sunk without trace.  Even so, its title would have been the right title for Umberto D.

    29 June 2024

  • Alice in the Cities

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alice in den Städten

    Wim Wenders (1974)

    Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), a thirtyish German writer visiting America, is due to hand in a commissioned article about his impressions of the country.  He has seen various places on his US travels and taken many Polaroid photographs but barely put pen to paper.  He tells his editor that he’s struggling to find inspiration; his editor informs Philip that he’s missed his deadline and won’t be paid a cent.  Looking to get a flight from New York to Munich, Philip learns there are no planes to West Germany because of a strike by ground crew staff.  He and Lisa van Dam (Lisa Kreuzer), a young woman also trying to get back to Germany, with her nine-year-old daughter, Alice (Yella Rottländer), are told their best option is a flight to Amsterdam the following day.  At Lisa’s request, Philip agrees to look after Alice while her mother goes to see the emotionally fragile boyfriend in New York whom she’s splitting with.  Next morning, Philip receives a note from Lisa, asking him to take Alice back to Amsterdam; Lisa says she’ll follow shortly.  That doesn’t happen and Philip, already low on funds, finds himself saddled with a bigger responsibility than an article deadline.

    Alice in the Cities is the first part of Wim Wenders’ ‘Road Movie Trilogy’.  Planes, boats and trains feature, too, but Philip, first on his own in the US, then with Alice in the Netherlands and Germany, spends much of the film behind the wheel of a car.  He often finds his sparky companion funny but, in her mother’s absence, Alice is increasingly demanding and tries his patience:  it doesn’t help that she’s well aware he wants rid of her.  When Lisa doesn’t turn up at Schipol Airport on the expected flight, Philip decides to leave Alice with officials there; when the little girl, distressed, locks herself in a toilet cubicle, it moves him to change his mind.  Alice’s grandmother lives somewhere in Germany but she can’t remember where.  Philip reels off an alphabetical list of German cities – all the way through to Wuppertal:  Alice decides that’s the place.  They catch a bus to the city and drive round it, one street at a time, in a rented car – until Alice announces that Wuppertal isn’t where grandma lives after all.  Exasperated, Philip drops her off at a police station.  As he wanders through Wuppertal, he sees a poster for a Chuck Berry concert.  He goes to the concert and enjoys himself.  He’s feeling more relaxed when he returns to his hotel.  Alice is waiting outside.

    It’s sometimes easy to write about a film’s themes and style without needing to give much plot detail.  Alice in the Cities isn’t one of those films.  The discursive series of events, some of them aimless, is essentially connected to Philip Winter’s temperament and circumstances.  The locations keep changing but Philip’s feelings of alienation, at least when he’s on his own rather than with Alice, don’t.  Robby Müller’s black-and-white cinematography is in two ways moody, suggesting Philip’s prevailing mood and a melancholy sense of mystery.  The often languorous tempo of Wim Wenders’ narrative also seems part of Philip’s mindset but this, like Müller’s lighting, never feels overstressed.  Alice and Philip first meet as he enters the NYC airport building; she’s mucking around in the revolving doors – they go round and round a couple of times.  The image is instantly to amusing; in retrospect, it foreshadows very nicely what their relationship will be.  Getting away from Alice is easier said than done for Philip; her persisting presence conveys the idea that he’s being pushed, reluctantly, towards becoming more responsible, less self-absorbed.  There’s a lovely sequence where Alice wants a bedtime story, Philip says he doesn’t know any stories, she gets upset and he makes one up – and finds that he enjoys doing so.

    Philip French rightly noted in a 2008 Observer review that Alice in the Cities could no longer be made ‘partly because of the invention of the mobile phone, partly because of our obsessive fear of anything that might be interpreted as paedophilia’ – never mind that even the protagonists’ relationship isn’t at all Lolita-esque.  The basic story – an odd couple thrown together – may be formulaic but Yella Rottländer’s animated, forthright, wilful Alice and Rüdiger Vogler’s irritable, listless yet sensitive Philip are a fine pairing.  (The acting in some of the smaller parts is primitive.)  Although their partnership is the heart of the film, Philip’s relationship with American culture is also explored.  He’s first seen sitting on a beach somewhere in America, under the boardwalk.  He sings to himself the chorus of the Drifters’ song – as if trying to make the reality of sitting under a boardwalk, mean what he thinks it should mean to him but which he doesn’t actually feel.  He seems interested in, or puzzled by, the look of American places but is often infuriated by the country’s soundtrack, especially commercials on a motel room TV that he’s moved to smash.  Is Philip keener on Americana once he’s partaking of it back in Germany?   Hard to tell.  Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’, which plays on a German jukebox, merely sounds, to these ears, as much a drag as it ever did.  Chuck Berry, an amazing camera subject, is a different matter.

    When Alice turns up outside his hotel, Philip isn’t angry.  He laughs, realising how pleased he is to see her, and they resume their road trip.  Alice has a snapshot of what she says is grandma’s house, which she’s sure she would recognise.  She and Philip find what looks to be the house somewhere in the Ruhr but the woman who lives there knows nothing of Alice’s grandmother.  Philip decides to head for his parents’ home, across the Rhine.  He and Alice are spotted on the ferry by a Wuppertal police officer.  He asks why Philip didn’t inform the police that the child was back wih him but doesn’t seem bothered to know the answer.  The officer simply informs Philip that Lisa has returned and Alice’s grandmother has been located, and puts Alice on a train to Munich to meet Lisa.  By now, Philip can’t even afford a train ticket; Alice produces a $100 bill so he accompanies her to Munich.  She asks what he’ll do there; he says he’ll finish his article; Alice, who has seen quite a bit of Philip’s desultory ‘scribbling’ (her word), raises her eyebrows.  They open the window of their train compartment and look out at the landscape together as the camera pulls up and away.

    Wenders wrote the screenplay with Veith von Fürstenberg.  The film’s happy ending seems intentionally willed so much so that you end up prepared to accept as more of the same some earlier bits of plotting that had seemed shaky.  (Getting a ticket for a Chuck Berry concert at the last moment would surely be harder than it appears to be.  It’s unclear how Alice manages to leave the police station without being noticed.)  In the Wenders filmography, Alice in the Cities seems to link not only to subsequent parts of the Road Trilogy (The Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976)) but also to elements of Paris, Texas (1984) – an absent mother, a grown-up and a child on a search together.  Paris,Texas is the more celebrated film but I prefer the simpler, more fluid Alice in the Cities.  (I’d seen it once before, about twenty years ago).  The minimal but effective score is by the German experimental rock band Can.

    28 June 2024

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