Paisà
Roberto Rossellini (1946)
Roberto Rossellini charts the advance of Allied, chiefly American, forces through Italy from the middle of 1943 until the end of 1944. Each of Paisan‘s six episodes is introduced by a voiceover (Giulio Panicali) that briefly supplies context – both geographical and in terms of the Allies’ overall progress, which is hardly a triumphal one.
In the first episode, during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, a US patrol, in need of an Italian-speaking guide, are helped to reach another part of the coast by Carmela (Carmela Sazio), a local woman in search of her father and brother. Carmela forms a bond with American soldier Joe (Robert Van Loon); when he is shot dead by a German sniper, she takes over Joe’s rifle and shoots at the enemy. Discovering Joe’s corpse, his fellow GIs wrongly assume that Carmela has killed him. The last scene shows her dead at the foot of cliffs. In the second episode, after the Allied capture of Naples, an orphaned street kid, Pasquale (Alfonsino), befriends another GI Joe (Dots M Johnson). The boy tells the soldier of his wartime experiences; when Joe falls asleep, Pasquale relieves him of his boots. Joe, a military policeman, also sees Pasquale thieving from an army truck but, once he has witnessed the squalor in which the child lives, makes no further effort to retrieve the stolen goods.
The third episode takes place in Rome. Prostitute Francesca (Maria Michi) meets American soldier Fred (Gar Moore) only to discover he doesn’t want sex with her but is searching for a young woman he fell in love with during the recent liberation of the city. That woman is Francesca: both she and Fred have changed so much in the interim that neither recognises the other at first but Francesca then realises it’s herself that Fred is describing. When he falls asleep, she asks his landlady (Lorena Berg) to give Fred a note of her address. He throws the note away, telling a fellow soldier this was a prostitute’s address. Episode four centres on fighting in the northern half of Florence between Italian partisans and German and Italian fascists; the latter’s blowing up of all bridges except the Ponte Vecchio has stalled the American advance. Harriet (Harriet White), a nurse, learns that the partisans’ leader is a man she knew in Florence before the war, known as Lupo. With the help of partisan Massimo (Renzo Avanzo), who is looking to find his family, Harriet enters Florence through the Vassari Corridor. She learns from a wounded partisan whom she tends there of Lupo’s recent death.
In the fifth episode, three US military chaplains spend the night at a Catholic monastery in the Apennines. Bill Martin (Bill Tubbs), the only one of the Americans to speak Italian, acts as interpreter for the visitors and their hosts. He’s also the only Catholic in the trio: the monks are shocked to learn that Bill’s colleagues are a Protestant (Owen Jones) and a Jew (Elmer Feldman). Although grateful for the food supplies received from the chaplains, the community decides to fast in the hope that divine grace will convert the Protestant and the Jew to what the monks deem the one truth faith. Despite the house rule that silence must be observed throughout mealtimes, Bill, during a supper that only the chaplains eat, insists on expressing his appreciation of the renewed sense of peace that the monastery has given him. The last episode takes place in December 1944, in the delta of the River Po, where three American intelligence officers are operating behind German lines and, with the assistance of Italian partisans, rescue two British airmen who have been shot down. The Germans execute an Italian family that has been helping the Americans, then, after a gunfight, capture the Americans and other partisans. A German officer (Van Loel) explains to them his country’s motives for war and resolve to achieve world domination. All the prisoners are shot dead.
The numerous shots of ruined cities echo images in Rossellini’s fine drama, Rome, Open City – and echo is the right word: I was surprised to be reminded after watching Paisan that it was made a year later than Rome, Open City, which is a more sophisticated blend of drama and quasi-documentary. The six names on the Paisan screenplay include Federico Fellini, who also has an assistant director credit. The film was part of Fellini’s neo-realist apprenticeship, may well have influenced other film-makers within the movement, and is certainly important as a piece of cinema history. But I found myself watching it respectfully rather than with a strong feeling of engagement. As suggested by some of the performers’ names above, Rossellini used a fair number of non-professional actors. The American soldiers in the cast, for example, are OK when they’re delivering orders or other lines familiar to them from military service; they tend not to be so effective when they start trying to inject dramatic force into proceedings. Dots Johnson, who went on to play roles in a few Hollywood films, is something of an exception. So is Gar Moore but it’s the acting of Maria Michi, who had appeared in Rome, Open City and would work regularly in Italian cinema into the 1970s, that lifts Paisan‘s third episode, despite the plot’s implausibility.
The last two episodes are the strongest, though for very different reasons. The monastery vignette stands out largely because the peaceful setting is incongruous in the film as a whole. Although the American chaplains’ line readings are wooden, the monks’ faith that the God who has delivered them from the Germans, will also bring about a miracle of apostasy, is remarkable to say the least. In the Po delta episode, DP Otello Martelli’s wide-angle shots of dark waters under a starry night sky are among the film’s most impressive images. Other details here – the toddler who cries lustily both before and after the execution of the adults who look after him, the calmly superior tone of the German officer – register strongly, too. At the piece’s tragic conclusion, Paisan‘s voiceover returns to announce, laconic to the last, that, ‘This happened in the winter of 1944. By the beginning of spring, the war was over’.
19 May 2024
