Viaggio in Italia
Roberto Rossellini (1954)
A commercial failure on its first appearance, influential in the years that followed, and now regarded as a key work of neorealism. I was shocked by how bad it was. Rossellini creates a texture which combines statuary, churches and ruins with real people in real streets. The recording of contemporary life is interesting enough and the display of cultural artefacts arresting but the story at the centre of Journey to Italy – of a marriage on the rocks – is pathetic. The unhappy couple are Alex and Katherine Joyce (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). I think they’re both meant to be English although Ingrid Bergman makes no attempt to sound it. It’s George Sanders’ limitations, though, that are one of the two main weaknesses of the film. He’s so indolent, both as a presence and as a performer, that it makes no sense when Katherine chides Alex for not enjoying their time in Italy because he’s anxious to get back to business in London. With Sanders playing him, Alex Joyce seems no more likely than Jack Favell in Rebecca ever to have worked for a living. Sanders sounds as if he can barely be bothered to read his lines at all, let alone give them life. Since the script, which Rossellini worked on with Vitaliano Brancati, is the other major weakness, you can see the actor’s point. The trailer at BFI – even though it immediately raised doubts about the casting of Sanders, with his unvarying sarcastic dryness, as part of a couple whose relationship is shifting and withering – made Journey to Italy look worth seeing. It had led me to expect a detailed chipping away to reveal the wreck of Alex and Katherine’s relationship. In fact, this is expressed crudely and monotonously.
Although the voices have the deadness of dubbed afterthoughts, I assume the film was made in English. Perhaps this is an instance of a film-maker whose native language isn’t English failing to hear the lack of rhythm – the woodenness – of what emerges from the soundtrack. The little-known actors in supporting parts are weak. The various salt-of-the-earth locals, although some of their faces are fine camera subjects, are obvious, one-note characters. Ingrid Bergman is the only reason to keep watching but she has nothing to play off – Sanders is as remote from her as Alex is from Katherine. The bodies that the couple see excavated at Pompeii and a bank of skulls are strong images but you can’t see how they connect to either of the two people experiencing them. I didn’t understand Bergman’s reactions to these, or to the things she sees in churches around Naples; it’s a laugh when Sanders says he is ‘pretty moved’ by the bodies at Pompeii. The film would make some kind of sense if these mementos mori startled the Joyces into deciding to continue to live together while they’re still physically capable but the pair carry on bickering and discussing divorce after this exposure to death, as they return to the centre to Naples. What jerks them back into their marriage is the sudden, temporary loss of each other in a sea of people gathered for a religious procession in the crowded streets but the separation is too staged – and the two stars stand out too clearly from everyone else in shot – for this to have any real impact.
21 May 2013
