i have never quite liked classic italian cinema — fellini, visconti, rossellini, de sica, you name ’em. i don’t think there’s a lot of people in italy who like them, but i may be generalizing what is the case in my family and the people of my region (italy is an extremely diverse country, to an extent that is probably hard for americans to comprehend). hollywood movies have always worked better in italy than italian movies. my mother, an educated woman, will simply not watch italian movies, however well done, inspiring, or american-like they are. she will barely watch any non-american movie, period. i suspect she may not be alone.
so, you see, i did not approach the leopard with great enthusiasm. in fact, i watched it only because michael had turned watching the film into a little titanic enterprise (it is) and i was curious. it took simon and me exactly a week to get through it. i’ll say straight off the bat that i’m not sure it was worth it.
one thing that i find hard to take in much of the great italian cinema is its humor. when it comes to their history and politics, italians tend to deal with things sideways rather than straight-on. it’s hard to be dead serious about a history that is chronically marred by foreign dominance, corruption, making-do, and, later, a messy democracy, corruption, and making-do. we are a people who don’t take themselves too seriously. just read sciascia, one of the greatest italian political writers — himself, like tomasi di lampedusa, a sicilian — and you’ll see what i mean.
this movie is, among other things, a funny movie, with a lot of intentionally comic moments. the humor comes from a bemused look at how fucked up things italian are, and the bemused expectation that they’ll stay that way, in spite of youthful idealisms and democratic revolutions. burt lancaster, who’s amazing, portrays the jaded irony of the italian who knows his country’s history and can predict his country’s future. alain delon is the youthful idealist. delon’s character, tancredi, is both an endlessly cheerful idiot and a very pretty boy, who prances around most of the time and gets seriously horny whenever claudia cardinale is around. cardinale is magnificent as, again, another italian prototype: the seductress who looks in love but is, all along, calculating her odds and her future gains. in line with her prototype, she looks less intelligent than she is, and has all the guys wrapped around her finger.
don fabrizio salina (lancaster) and his adopted nephew tancredi have a deep love for one another, a love that allows their friendship to thrive even as they sit (for a bit) on opposite sides of the political debate (salina is, in theory, against the democratic unification of italy brought by garibaldi and his troops, though he fully sees its inevitability). since italian political allegiances are, however, very fluid, it is not long till don fabrizio and tancredi can toast once again to the new italy — the italy which will remain after all the same (“in order for things to remain the same, they need to change”).
contrary to appearances, this film is less about class than about preserving the deep and rich italian soul in the face of endless, potentially dispiriting, political turmoil.
so, why didn’t i like it? because forty more years of fucked up italian politics have made me weary to the bone. because i’d rather see a movie about what can be done than a movie that encourages me to keep my humor when confronted with the fact that nothing at all can be done. because i’ve left italy behind, both geographically and, to a large extent, in my heart.
Nice post. I hereby refuse to watch The Leopard.
I’m not sure of why gio’s post would inspire the reaction to refuse to see The Leopard. I’m not sure even Gio believes in what comes across as a very American kind of utilitarianism for art, asking that movies express “what can be done.” it seems to me the movie is worth watching even for its melancholy and bemused detached examination of politics in the 19th Century. I think Gio may share with me a certain lack of interest in the melancholy of the autocratic born-to-power classes in the face of their decline, as well as an objection to The Leopard’s vision that the democratic unification is merely one eruption of chaos in an eternal landscape of chaos. The novel, too, suffers from a tone of the cynical aristocrat coming to terms with the lack of manners and taste in the up and coming bourgeois. ultimately Lampedusa and probably Visconti are aestheticians–I’d like to see what a more political filmmaker might do to skewer the Olympian sadness that The Leopard adopts. But in any case,I can understand Gio’s reactions but still advocate the film as something to watch both for the noteworthy performances and for what film does when it tries to tell a story both sweeping and intimate.
yeah, i am perplexed by jeff’s reaction, too. the reasons why i did not jive to the the leopard are, as i think i made clear, rather personal, having to do with my weariness of italian chronic political dysfunctionality. but the movie is pretty impressive. i don’t think, mike, that visconti is much interested in the melancholic decline of the powerful, as much as in the melancholy of change when combined with the awareness that such change is always, per force fictitious. hence the love between don fabrizio and tancredi. the former looks upon the latter with great benevolence, because tancredi still believes in change, and don fabrizio wishes he could, too.
for a truly patrician story, one should watch the barbarian invasion, not the leopard, which, as i said, is less about class or aesthetics that it at first appears.
I like The Barbarian Invasion very much. Sorry for my glib response. The Leopard had never been a film I’ve wanted to see so, in the heat of the moment, I made a silly statement. I’m still not going to search the film out, but such unwillingness to make up my own mind has nothing to do with Gio’s genuine and heartfelt response to why the film didn’t work for her.
I very much like De Sica’s Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief. And I look forward to the day when I can watch The Conformist with the original language track as opposed to the dubbed versions floating around old school video stores. And there are many things to like about Passolini, particularly his work in the late sixties and early seventies. Fellini’s Amaracord is a lovely movie as well.