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The very first thing i noticed was Federico Fellini's name appearing several times in the credits at the start, i paused the movie to see what he did for it; he wrote one of the six episodes as well as assistant-directed the film; he filmed the sicilian scenes in Maori. Pretty much right away that upped my enthusiasm for my first Rosselini film since i'm a Fellini fan. I respect Rosselini for deferring a fair amount of this film to others who were better suited for the good of the film while still shaping it with his vision, it wasn't just Fellini who played a major part the other five episodes were written by five other writers; some of the film is in English and i'm guessing the British writer Alfred Hayes largely wrote that dialogue which makes sense. It is a big epic war film that involves various different countries so i don't think it could've worked as well as it did if Rosselini hadn't accepted the input of others. Germany, Japan, America, Britain, Russia and France all overshadow Italy's involvement in the war at least in films i've seen so i found this very interesting. It's difficult to write about this because as i said it's seperated into six different stories set in the Italian Campaign of WWII. I'll try and write about them individually.
Episode 1 is about a group of American Soldiers going through an Italian village eventually a local agrees to lead them to a German minefield but first they take shelter in a ruined castle. Robert Van Loon was very good as Joe from Jersey; most of the episode is focused on a very sweet and endearing conversation he has with the local Carmela while he is watching her. Not a romantic conversation, it is both of them attempting to communicate as he doesn't speak Italian well and she doesn't speak English at all, he mostly spends it reminiscing about home with a nice score on top of it. It's very well written, alot of it is either him picking up a word she said in Italian but without the context of everything else she said he changes the subject; for example she speaks of baby cows and he picks up the word "bambino" and thinks she is asking him if he is the baby of his family so he starts talking about his family, she does the same with his english. Both did a very good job of bouncing off each other. It had a sad ending after you had gotten to know Joe. Episode 2 is about an orphan kid hanging around with a very drunk african-american soldier. Don't know what to say about this one, i didn't like it at first; they seemed to portray the african-american soldier as a big dumb, violent idiot at first and it was all chaotic and hard to watch. Once he sits down with the kid and starts enacting his fantasy of the reception he'll get when he goes home which will obviously not be reality i came to like it though. The end to this one absolutely crippled me, i was on the verge of tears and i knew it was going to get heavier as there were still four episodes left. All it was was a straightforward troubled orphan tale, the music when he realized as well as him dropping the shoes and more than anything what got to me was how unphased by it the kid seemed. It was a completely different approach to the usual sad, crying orphan child, this kid had accepted what life had given him and he'd adjusted to it which is somehow even sadder especially the way it was depicted. Episode 3 is a flashback from a drunken american soldier he is telling to a prostitute who has taken him to her house to try and sell her services, but he's not interested and he tells her why. This one was probably the weakest, it wasn't bad the whole thing was just hard to swallow. The soldier explains to the prostitute Francesca that he isn't interested because six months earlier he fell in love with another Italian woman; of course Francesca realizes it was her.... wait what? Yeah, i could understand if it was a decade earlier maybe, but it has been six months and apparently these two lovebirds didn't recognize each other and not just that Francesca makes it more difficult for some reason, instead of telling him it is her she arranges some idealistic romantic meeting the next day; of course opening it up to the possibility of things going wrong. It was really dumb and contrived, to be fair though it was really short compared to the others.
Episode 4 takes part in Florence where all the bridges have been blown up stopping the allied advancement. This follows an american nurse who is trying to reunite with a well known man called Lupo. Don't really know what to say about this one, it's more of an adventure, it is very intense and chaotic; love the mmusic. Full of running about, stopping to talk to people while she is trying to get to Lupo and a guy she is with Massimo is trying to get to his family. Very well directed. Episode 5 is about three american soldiers staying the night in a monastery. This one was really shocking to me, it was full of sweet monks and very polite soldiers, i couldn't imagine what could possibly be the conflict here, possibly the Germans invanding the church i was thinking. Then it came, the monks found out one of the soldiers was a jew which got them all terrified and remorseful; one asked St. Francis for forgiveness and another prayed to Jesus to protect them. I almost burst out laughing it came out of nowhere. There's a good if not slightly heavy-handed conversation between the catholic soldier and the monks where they get turned into the bad guys and he explains that he has no right judging them. Just want to say this had the most jarring edit ever, there's a few weird edits in this actually it might not even be edits, it might be the copy i had even though it was of good quality had a few problems i don't know. Anyway the jewish and protestant soldiers walk into the doorway in the background of the catholic soldier and the monks then mid sentence there's a clear edit/skip and they suddenly aren't there anymore, i looked at it again and thing is i can't tell if it skipped part of what he was saying and that's why it is or not. He's standing in the one position throughout and what he says would make sense there but it could very well have skipped. No big deal just pretty funny. Episode 6 This part was really gorgeous, paddling about a lake with big open fields nearby, it was a pleasure to look at. This was similar to episode 4, alot more action like you'd normally expect in a war film. Not much i can say about this part other than i liked it, good but very bleak ending.
For the record because i'm obsessed with ranking things i'd personally go: 2>4=1>6>5>3. Anyway, great introduction to Rosselini, the film is of course uneven because it's six different stories. Some are better than others and there's a massive cast so some performances are great and some aren't. Overall though it works very well as a whole, there's some common themes throughout the stories and there are so many great moments. As you can tell a big thing in the film is struggling to communicate, through finding ways to understand each other comes alot of the films beauty and sadness. Very good film, a great depection of very humanistic events and lessons in a war setting. I can see why this is one of Martin Scorsese's favourite films and his favourite from Rosselini.
Paisan
The very first thing i noticed was Federico Fellini's name appearing several times in the credits at the start, i paused the movie to see what he did for it; he wrote one of the six episodes as well as assistant-directed the film; he filmed the sicilian scenes in Maori. Pretty much right away that upped my enthusiasm for my first Rosselini film since i'm a Fellini fan. I respect Rosselini for deferring a fair amount of this film to others who were better suited for the good of the film while still shaping it with his vision, it wasn't just Fellini who played a major part the other five episodes were written by five other writers; some of the film is in English and i'm guessing the British writer Alfred Hayes largely wrote that dialogue which makes sense. It is a big epic war film that involves various different countries so i don't think it could've worked as well as it did if Rosselini hadn't accepted the input of others. Germany, Japan, America, Britain, Russia and France all overshadow Italy's involvement in the war at least in films i've seen so i found this very interesting. It's difficult to write about this because as i said it's seperated into six different stories set in the Italian Campaign of WWII. I'll try and write about them individually.
Episode 1 is about a group of American Soldiers going through an Italian village eventually a local agrees to lead them to a German minefield but first they take shelter in a ruined castle. Robert Van Loon was very good as Joe from Jersey; most of the episode is focused on a very sweet and endearing conversation he has with the local Carmela while he is watching her. Not a romantic conversation, it is both of them attempting to communicate as he doesn't speak Italian well and she doesn't speak English at all, he mostly spends it reminiscing about home with a nice score on top of it. It's very well written, alot of it is either him picking up a word she said in Italian but without the context of everything else she said he changes the subject; for example she speaks of baby cows and he picks up the word "bambino" and thinks she is asking him if he is the baby of his family so he starts talking about his family, she does the same with his english. Both did a very good job of bouncing off each other. It had a sad ending after you had gotten to know Joe. Episode 2 is about an orphan kid hanging around with a very drunk african-american soldier. Don't know what to say about this one, i didn't like it at first; they seemed to portray the african-american soldier as a big dumb, violent idiot at first and it was all chaotic and hard to watch. Once he sits down with the kid and starts enacting his fantasy of the reception he'll get when he goes home which will obviously not be reality i came to like it though. The end to this one absolutely crippled me, i was on the verge of tears and i knew it was going to get heavier as there were still four episodes left. All it was was a straightforward troubled orphan tale, the music when he realized as well as him dropping the shoes and more than anything what got to me was how unphased by it the kid seemed. It was a completely different approach to the usual sad, crying orphan child, this kid had accepted what life had given him and he'd adjusted to it which is somehow even sadder especially the way it was depicted. Episode 3 is a flashback from a drunken american soldier he is telling to a prostitute who has taken him to her house to try and sell her services, but he's not interested and he tells her why. This one was probably the weakest, it wasn't bad the whole thing was just hard to swallow. The soldier explains to the prostitute Francesca that he isn't interested because six months earlier he fell in love with another Italian woman; of course Francesca realizes it was her.... wait what? Yeah, i could understand if it was a decade earlier maybe, but it has been six months and apparently these two lovebirds didn't recognize each other and not just that Francesca makes it more difficult for some reason, instead of telling him it is her she arranges some idealistic romantic meeting the next day; of course opening it up to the possibility of things going wrong. It was really dumb and contrived, to be fair though it was really short compared to the others.
Episode 4 takes part in Florence where all the bridges have been blown up stopping the allied advancement. This follows an american nurse who is trying to reunite with a well known man called Lupo. Don't really know what to say about this one, it's more of an adventure, it is very intense and chaotic; love the mmusic. Full of running about, stopping to talk to people while she is trying to get to Lupo and a guy she is with Massimo is trying to get to his family. Very well directed. Episode 5 is about three american soldiers staying the night in a monastery. This one was really shocking to me, it was full of sweet monks and very polite soldiers, i couldn't imagine what could possibly be the conflict here, possibly the Germans invanding the church i was thinking. Then it came, the monks found out one of the soldiers was a jew which got them all terrified and remorseful; one asked St. Francis for forgiveness and another prayed to Jesus to protect them. I almost burst out laughing it came out of nowhere. There's a good if not slightly heavy-handed conversation between the catholic soldier and the monks where they get turned into the bad guys and he explains that he has no right judging them. Just want to say this had the most jarring edit ever, there's a few weird edits in this actually it might not even be edits, it might be the copy i had even though it was of good quality had a few problems i don't know. Anyway the jewish and protestant soldiers walk into the doorway in the background of the catholic soldier and the monks then mid sentence there's a clear edit/skip and they suddenly aren't there anymore, i looked at it again and thing is i can't tell if it skipped part of what he was saying and that's why it is or not. He's standing in the one position throughout and what he says would make sense there but it could very well have skipped. No big deal just pretty funny. Episode 6 This part was really gorgeous, paddling about a lake with big open fields nearby, it was a pleasure to look at. This was similar to episode 4, alot more action like you'd normally expect in a war film. Not much i can say about this part other than i liked it, good but very bleak ending.
For the record because i'm obsessed with ranking things i'd personally go: 2>4=1>6>5>3. Anyway, great introduction to Rosselini, the film is of course uneven because it's six different stories. Some are better than others and there's a massive cast so some performances are great and some aren't. Overall though it works very well as a whole, there's some common themes throughout the stories and there are so many great moments. As you can tell a big thing in the film is struggling to communicate, through finding ways to understand each other comes alot of the films beauty and sadness. Very good film, a great depection of very humanistic events and lessons in a war setting. I can see why this is one of Martin Scorsese's favourite films and his favourite from Rosselini.