Out of Italy

The celebrated partnership of Vittorio De Sica, an actor who became one of Italy’s—and the West’s—most revered directors, and Cesare Zavattini, a screenwriter and film theorist, was inaugurated in the movies with the luminous The Children Are Watching Us in 1944, although the two knew each other for more than a decade prior. Together, their collaborations of Italian neorealism were more mystical and allegorical than the harsher social portraits of corruption and decay in the work of other Italian neorealists like Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. The De Sica-Zavattini films are smaller-scale studies in frailty and innocence; instead of making Grand Statements about politics and society, they paint individuals in unselfconscious but lyrical strokes—prose poetry character studies. If, years after viewing, we’ve forgotten the scenes of wartorn Rome and its political infighting in Rossellini, we probably still remember the disillusioned faces in De Sica.

Zavattini’s realism is an homage to the nineteenth century Russian novelists, particularly Turgenev and Tolstoy. (Jean Renoir paid tribute to the Russian and French realists in much the same way.) De Sica, a great director, uses actors’ faces and classic narrative conventions like linearity and situational irony to tell stories of the bereft—losers, dreamers, and children enduring the cold hopelessness of life on the skids. He hits his mark, too. The emotional impact of these movies wells up like a rising tide, evenly and surely. In the final scene of The Children Are Watching Us, the camera fixes on the back of the abandoned child as he trudges away, and the indictment of all squabbling, selfish, vain adults is complete.

Scenes from childhood. Luciano De Ambrosis

The De Sica-Zavattini collaboration produced about twenty films, including the hallowed masterpieces Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us isn’t quite one of the masterpieces, but its incandescence and Petrarchan sweetness can’t be shaken off easily. It points the way to the fables of childhood in Truffaut, the Taviani brothers, and Shunji Iwai.

A Capricious Masterpiece

Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) was voted the third greatest film of all time by an international group of critics for a 1962 Sight and Sound poll, and the fourth greatest film of all time by a 2012 panel of critics and scholars brought together by the British Film Institute. This fabled masterpiece is widely regarded as the greatest French film by a master French director, and decade after decade hangs on to its hallowed place at the summit of world cinema.

The hunt. Mila Parely

Apart from its standing with the experts, La Règle du jeu is in just about every movie lover’s Top Ten. It’s as rich an experience as you are likely to have in a theater; you’ll never see the movie’s neoclassical sources of continental theater performed with as much shattering brilliance. Renoir and his team (which included Henri Cartier-Bresson as an assistant) infuse centuries of high comic tradition into a Modernist farce that only appears as if it were spinning out of control. In fact, it’s a completely controlled tragicomedy in which chance, or fate, is the prime mover.

Just about every social or cultural anchor—love, honor, class, even classical distinctions between literary genres—is dismantled in La Règle. The title is doubly ironic: the social classes abided by their rules in prewar Europe, love had its rules, comedy and tragedy had their rules. Renoir smashes these rules into pieces. La Règle in 1939 points the way to the absurdist strain in Modernism. The animal hunt is a shocking, profound visualization of the slaughter during the Great War and the slaughter to come—warfare on land (the rabbits) and in the air (the birds). (When Germany marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, several of Renoir’s technicians left the filming to join the army.)

The idea of the disintegration of class distinctions, of class relationships teeming with infidelity and jealousy, had been dramatized in Musset (whose Les Caprices de Marianne Renoir used as a springboard), Beaumarchais, and Molière. In La Règle, ignobility is society’s great leveler (the way cats all seem to be the same color at night), much as you find it in Enlightenment theater traditions. But the movie pounces on the modern: civilization itself becomes a witches’ sabbath in which sentiment is juxtaposed with raunchy sex chases, heroes (like the hapless aviator) are turned into victims of mischief, and the intricate organizing impulse of society itself crumbles into a mayhem of poaching (both animal and sexual). In earlier French literature, immoral and moral were binary opposites, but in La Règle it’s the revelrous commingling of the immoral with the amoral that drives our experience. That’s what makes the movie so absolutely modern, and so sustaining. Like the Shakespearean comedies, this Renoir masterpiece lets us peer more deeply into our social and sexual selves.