La Cina è vicina
Marco Bellocchio (1967)
Ennio Morricone’s music during the opening credits is martial at first. It then introduces a humorous element. The humorous makes the martial sound comical, even silly. The music is apt but has summed up China is Near before it’s begun, anticipating the assured, witty but thinly textured socio-political satire to come. Each of the main characters in Marco Bellocchio’s second feature is propelled by energetic self-interest and often appears foolish as a result. The farce style of the piece, although entertaining, allows for few surprises.
The Malvezzi family belongs to Romagna’s landed gentry. The family’s latest generation comprises three unmarried siblings: Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), a professor with longstanding, unfulfilled political ambitions; Elena (Elda Tattoli, who shares the screenplay credit with Bellocchio), whose main activity is sleeping around; and the seventeen-year-old Camillo (Pierluigi Aprà), a Maoist student. All three are rebelling against and at the same time reflecting their aristocratic and Catholic background. Vittorio, though pompous and self-absorbed, wants to bring about social change, partly to salve his conscience. Elena, uninterested in politics, is promiscuous with men less well off than she is; since they’re socially infra dig and may want her only for her money, she doesn’t develop lasting relationships. His affluent circumstances and continuing seminary education intensify Camillo’s hardline Maoism.
The other two key characters are less privileged. Carlo (Paolo Graziosi), a clever young accountant, is, like Vittorio, a would-be politico on the Italian Left. His lover Giovanna (Daniela Surina), Vittorio’s secretary and book-keeper, rejects her employer’s lustful advances, at least until Carlo, socially as well politically ambitious, turns his sexual attention elsewhere. A pivotal event in the story occurs when Vittorio is chosen in preference to Carlo to stand as a candidate in regional government elections. Carlo, the treasurer of the local Socialist party, decides to cut his losses by managing Vittorio’s campaign and seducing Elena into the bargain. Camillo, who deplores his brother’s acceptance of a relatively moderate political ticket, starts plotting, with two other members of a Maoist cell, to subvert Vittorio’s bid for office. (The film’s title is a phrase that Camillo scrawls on the wall outside Vittorio’s campaign headquarters.)
The physical contrasts between the five main actors are expressive. Paolo Graziosi gives Carlo a lean-and-hungry, crafty charm but Glauco Mauri’s Vittorio dominates proceedings. One senses in Mauri’s accomplished, vigorous performance the presence of an expert theatrical farceur. But Vittorio isn’t gradually exposed as a buffoon: he’s a ridiculous figure from his very first appearance in the film – sitting on the toilet. (He may be either trying to relieve his constipation or masturbating – at any rate, he’s praying for God’s forgiveness.) Vittorio must be an election candidate for the sake of the plot but he’s clearly a loser; with nothing at stake except the personal vanity that we can see (through) from the start, he’s soon tiresome. At this distance in time anyway, the moral embarrassments Bellocchio puts him through, whether public or private, seem predictable – from an encounter between this champagne socialist and the proletariat to Vittorio’s repeated apologies to Giovanna for demanding of her things not in her job description.
One of the most appealing sequences, when a choir of young boys raucously serenades a bedridden priest, is also evidence that Bellocchio is having a laugh beyond his derisive treatment of the politically conflicted characters. Few of the choristers can keep a straight face and it’s obvious the kids playing them, rather than the characters they’re playing, who are so much amused by what they’re being asked to do. Their caught-on-camera reactions are infectiously funny. Music plays an interesting role in China is Near. When Vittorio and Elena take their box at the opera, she gets bored with what’s on stage rather as she was earlier impatient with going through the motions of grace before dinner. Opera and religion are both cultural old hat to an aristocratic palate as jaded as Elena’s.
The BFI programme note included Andrew Sarris’s Village Voice review, along with a shorter extract from Pauline Kael’s New Yorker article. (Both pieces are admiring.) Sarris makes some bizarre judgments, including that ‘Glauco Mauri’s performance is one of the most beautiful characterisations in the history of cinema’. I agree with him, though, about the impact of the film’s first scene – that we ‘never completely escape the chilling greyness of this opening sequence’, in which Carlo and Giovanna wake from ‘an improvised bed in an unidentified room in the cold, grey light of dawn’. The stark, unlovely setting charges the pair’s desire to make rich marriages for themselves that drives the plot. The scene also stays in the mind because it’s different – both more sympathetic and more suggestive – from those that follow.
2 July 2018
