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Voyage
in Italy
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Jacques Rivette wrote in 1955 that Roberto
Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy “opens a
breach [that] all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through”. (1) This breach
is evident from its very first shots, disconcertingly sudden and raw: a shaky,
forward-driving view down a road into Naples; a faster, even less revealing
glimpse of the roadside going by; and finally two stars, Ingrid Bergman and
George Sanders, shipwrecked far from Hollywood, plainly out of their element in
this plotless, not-quite-picaresque road-movie cruise in which they must
express their deepest levels of character through terse banalities and simple,
mundane gestures.
Noawadays, critics talk a lot about the comedy of remarriage, a genre in which
couples somehow put their union to the test and, after many complications, work
out a way to reaffirm it. Voyage in Italy is, like Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Emergency Kisses (1989) and The Abyss (1989), that rarer thing: a drama of
remarriage, in which the spark of revitalisation must be found within the
undramatic flow of daily togetherness.
The Joyces, Alex and Katherine, bored and
resentful of each other, are in a state of suspension. Like in the novel and
film of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky (in which the couple never reunite), being “on
holiday” leaves them disturbed, sometimes even distressed by the foreign
culture with which they are surrounded. The food is different, sleep beckons at
odd hours under the sun, music seeps in everywhere, there are encounters with
strangers who offer distraction or temptation …
The couple have
certainly made a journey to Italy,
with the film dwelling on the cultural difference between themselves and the
country they find themselves in. But the Italian title refers more exactly to a
journey in or through Italy – a journey that takes place on many levels, both
interior and exterior. As in Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934) – and
later in Eyes Wide Shut – this
troubled couple will temporarily part ways, each going on a separate drift
around their new environment.
Alex’s wandering, and his inconsequential flirtations
with various women, is the less evidently dramatic of the two journeys. He’s a
jaded guy who protects himself with sarcasm and keeps his feelings buried.
Katherine’s skin is thinner; her composure is disturbed both by memories of her
own past, and the heady, chaotic atmosphere around her …
For there is, forcefully here, the
presence of the landscape, the cities of Capri, Pompei … and especially Naples,
the place that was once described so well by Asja Lacis
and Walter Benjamin: “Porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city,
reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday. And how
much weekday there is in this Sunday!” (2) Such a vision of porosity – Sunday
and weekday, religious mysticism and the gritty everyday combined – is also a
good description of Rossellini’s own earthy sense of spirituality.
Voyage to Italy typifies the radical turn in Rossellini’s work of the
‘50s, especially the films he made with wife Bergman: this is no longer
social-issue neorealism, but an inner or emotional realism, strikingly modern,
prefiguring the alienation theme in Antonioni and especially the Godard of Contempt (1963). But there is still a sense of documentary
reality everywhere, in the views Katherine sees out her car, in the churches,
the catacombs, the mud pools, the archaeological excavations … These sights are
not handy metaphors: they are concrete reality, experiences upon which
Rossellini and his team appear to have stumbled “in process”.
This insistent environment adds context,
history and even mythology, a long view, to the personal, marital story. It
brings the past to bear upon the present, just as all the characters endlessly
recall previous, formative moments in their lives. And it places this one,
small crisis into a great, cosmic cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The ending of Voyage in Italy is often described as a miracle – and, literally, it juxtaposes
what appears to be a sacred miracle with a scene of separation and reunion
between Katherine and Alex.
The very idea for this final, cinematic clinch – two
people torn apart by a surging crowd – has itself become a hoary old, dramatic
cliché since 1953. But Rossellini invests it with a genuinely redemptive
feeling, and a sense that second chances for married lovers are forever
possible – if they search long enough, work hard enough, and are in the right place
at the right moment for all the materials and elements of the world to aid in
their togetherness.
Little is explained in Voyage in Italy, but everything is felt.
And here is a film that can proudly end – can almost end, before one more, one
last image of a passing, ordinary crowd – with a sweeping crane shot and the
age-old declaration: “I love you”.
Note: for an extended, detailed treatment
of the above ideas, listen to my audio commentary on the Voyage to Italy DVD, available on the British Film Institute Rossellini/Bergman box set of 2015;
this commentary originally appeared on the now rare Madman (Australia) release
of 2007.
1. Jacques Rivette (trans. Tom Milne), “Letter
on Rossellini", in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers
du cinéma, The 1950s: Neorealism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University
Press, 1985), p. 192.
2.
Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (trans. Edmund Jephcott), “Naples”, Walter Benjamin elected Writings Volume 1:
1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 417.
© Adrian Martin June 2003 / April 2015
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