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 Passage from India

Indian summer. Riz Ahmed (left) and Freida Pinto

Trishna (2011) is the most intelligent sort of literary adaptation—a luminous resetting of Hardy’s Tess of the D'urbervilles that transforms externals into inspired new forms and retains the sweeping sexual power of its source. I have no end of admiration for Michael Winterbottom, the director, who paints vividly in short takes. He builds momentum using the techniques of classical montage (one scene, of an auto accident on a dusty road, builds until the portentous edits feel like something out of October), and pays homage to movie antecedents ranging from Vittorio De Sica to David Lean. Winterbottom knows where to put actors in the frame and how to structure cuts to give the excellent dialogue its due.

Winterbottom’s palette is as mature and varied as that of any other big director working today in English-speaking movies, including Mike Leigh and Wes Anderson. A Cock and Bull Story (2006) is one of the freshest and most innovative comedies of the new century, and Genova (2007) dabbles in mystical sentiment. Like both of those movies, Trishna gathers power in the telling and casts an uncanny glow over the memory.