Roberto Rossellini (1950)
Interesting – but less a marriage of Italian neo-realism and Hollywood-inflected melodrama than a demonstration of their incompatibility. The cast includes Ingrid Bergman, Italian actors who are often uneasy speaking English, and non-professionals – in the opening scenes at an internment camp, and on the island where most of the action takes place. For an English-speaking audience, the passages in un-subtitled Italian (and a few bits in German and French at the start) certainly create an atmosphere of alienation, of not belonging. There are some beautiful, austere passages describing life on Stromboli (‘terra di Dio’ – in the full Italian title of the film), especially the scenes of fishermen at work; and Bergman commits herself powerfully to the role of Karin, an educated Lithuanian refugee who marries Antonio, a good-looking, simple-minded Italian prisoner-of-war, and returns to live with him on his native island.
Karin finds the life there stultifying and the islanders find much of her behaviour unacceptable. The film keeps lurching from virtual (and absorbing) documentary into crudely melodramatic set pieces which, in spite of her resilient naturalism, Bergman isn’t able to transform. The three principal male actors are all effective, in different ways. Mario Vitale, as Antonio, is completely convincing as a fisherman – which is what he was, according to IMDB, when Rossellini discovered him in 1949 – and as a man to whom actions and feelings come more easily than words. Mario Sponzo, as the man at a lighthouse, to whom Karin is drawn, connects with Bergman in his scenes with her. As a priest whom Karin turns to for help, Renzo Cesana is the only other member of the cast with anything like Bergman’s professionalism. The confrontation between them is, in conventional dramatic terms, by some way the best scene in the film (especially the priest’s reaction when Karin has gone from the room – you can see that he’s working to suppress his sexual feelings about her). Cesana also co-wrote the screenplay, with Rossellini and others. The island seems to be heavily populated or empty according to the requirements of each scene but dominating all human life there is the volcano which erupts and on which, in a compelling and bizarre climax to the story, Karin meets her death.
28 January 2009
