“The Earth Trembles”/”La Terra Trema” (1948)
The purest expression of the neo-realist side of Visconti’s dualism (though it grew out of a desire to adapt the novel on which it is now only very loosely based), the strikingly beautiful “The Earth Trembles” is, in its way, as magnificent, epic, and operatic as any of Visconti’s later films. Yet bedded down into its stark, unforgiving landscape like one of the immovable black rocks that dot the coastline of the Sicilian island, Aci Trezza, where the action takes place, “The Earth Trembles” is grounded by a resilient, unflinching humanism. At the same time, the non-professional cast portray the central family and the other islanders with such authenticity and straightforward simplicity that the film’s allegorical power, heightened by use of a poetic, omniscient voiceover, is foregrounded. Telling the story of one embattled family, whose men and boys have for generations earned a subsistence living as fishermen, it’s primarily concerned with clashing ideologies as the eldest son of the family, Antonio, his mind a little broadened by his time on the mainland (which is very rarely referred to otherwise in this isolated island microcosm), instigates a small revolt against the unjust prevailing social order. He mortgages the family home to buy a boat and go into business for himself, cutting out the leering middlemen wholesalers who raise or depress fish prices seemingly on a whim. But after a brief period of optimism, the small-mindedness of their neighbors, the entropy of tradition, the cruelty of nature, and sheer bad luck conspire against the humble hopes of the Valastros family. It sounds depressing, but somehow it’s bigger than that, more attuned to both the foolishness and the quixotic nobility of trying to row against the tide. It’s also, strangely for the avowedly Marxist Visconti, a little despairing about the efficacy of collective action as a means to change to status quo. But perhaps the greatest enigma of this inarguably brilliant film comes from watching the evocative yet authentic naturalism of these shots, these faces, these landscapes: why would Visconti ever work in a style other than the one he achieves so beautifully here?
“Senso” (1954)
A gloriously full-throated, unapologetic melodrama about ruinous love in a time of political upheaval, it’s not hard to see why the lush, extravagant “Senso” was regarded as a betrayal by Visconti fans hoping to see a return to his neo-realist beginnings. If anything, “Senso” feels like one of his most defiant rejections of the tenets of that movement, as in it, the Austrian-Italian war of Unification of 1866, and the struggle of the ordinary nationalist Italians against the occupying Austrians, is used as little more than an (exquisitely mounted) plot device. It’s a struggle eventually wholly betrayed by Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli), an unhappily married Italian countess whose pronounced Nationalist sympathies are tossed aside when she falls insanely in love with handsome, fly-by-night Austrian officer Franz (Farley Granger). Franz uses Livia and casts her aside, before leaching more money out of her to spend on bribing doctors to certify that he cannot fight (he’s not only a cad and a faithless lover, he’s a coward!) and Livia, after her brief moment of delirious happiness, plunges headlong into degradation, entirely complicit in her own ultimate humiliation. As it sounds, this is not a film for the romantic melodrama-averse, but Valli’s fantastic performance as the increasing deranged yet coolly self-destructive Livia is surely one of the great turns in a genre notable for giving meaty roles to women. And the climax of the film, set in a parlor as Franz taunts Livia by making her ask his prostitute to stay to tea with them is surely one for the ages. Visconti does make a little room for outside context — Livia has a passionately nationalist cousin Roberto, whose money she eventually gives to Franz, thereby condemning Roberto’s company of men to a crushing defeat. And in the middle of all the figurative battles, Visconti also stages a literal one in a remarkably epic scene in which soldiers fall between haystacks and scramble over hilltops like so many ants. But here the dial is pushed all the way up to 11 for emotional, operatic “women’s picture” drama: it’s not the deepest or weightiest of Visconti’s films, but it’s one of his most ravishingly beautiful and one of his most lavishly entertaining.
“White Nights”/”Le Notti Bianche” (1957)
Perhaps as a direct reaction against excesses of “Senso,” Visconti returned to black-and-white stock and to near-contemporary Italy for this beautiful, bittersweet romance. But it’s hardly just a formal retreat, in fact “White Nights” adds a string to Visconti’s bow that is not much in evidence elsewhere: here the acknowledged master of the sweeping period opera and the allegorically powerful neo-realist drama pares everything back to deliver formally classic simplicity. The talky intimacy of this film, which unfolds almost like a tightly choreographed 1950s precursor to “Before Sunrise,” is possibly unique in his oeuvre, and it makes “White Nights” one of his most straightforwardly affecting films. Which is not to say it is without structural flourishes: in fact he shows a lovely command of temporal manipulation as he seamlessly hides cuts into and out of flashbacks and makes events from long ago that are being recounted feel like they’re happening contiguously. Which, of course, they are for the film’s principals, both of whom are haunted by the promise of a love that time, or timing, has put just out of their reach. Based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky (which apparently also inspired the not-at-all-similar “Two Lovers” from James Gray), it follows Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a lonely man newly arrived in a crumbling Italian city. One evening he meets Natalia (Maria Schell) on a bridge at dusk and a tentative relationship springs up between the two lost souls — Natalia’s loneliness has a different source as she is waiting for her man (Jean Marais) who may or may not ever return to her. Unfolding in glorious chiaroscuro photography on back streets at twilight, in nighttime doorways and most swooningly, during the first fall of snow on a canal boat ride, the film is really mostly a series of conversations between the two as, flawed though they are (she can seem coquettish at one point and cold the next), they build a fragile connection with touching tenderness. This being Visconti, however, we can hardly expect a traditionally happy ending, no matter how oddly classical the film feels overall, but the ambivalent note of acceptance, of happiness rented briefly rather than owned forever, feels far more truthful than a happy ever after, and it makes this Visconti film feel like maybe his most timeless.
