JOURNEY TO ITALY, by João Bénard da Costa
On Rossellini's film.
JOURNEY TO ITALY
a film by ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Late October, early November 1955. I was 20, and still didn't know anyone from the group that a year later formed the Center for Cinema Culture of the Catholic Youth. I also didn't read the Cahiers du Cinéma, whose name I hadn't even heard of. Since 1950 – the year Stromboli premiered in Portugal – I was being told Rossellini had lost his initial qualities (those of Rome, open city, which had so made me cry when I was still in my boy shorts) by letting himself get caught in the skirts of Ingrid Bergman. God Almighty hadn't forgiven the adulterers; sin had only done them harm. He, no longer a neorealist, no longer nothing. She, a sad shadow of what she once was.
Truth or dare: neither Stromboli, at 15, nor Europe 51, at 18 (alongside my friend Tucho) had left me any – oh, woe is me! – long-lasting impressions. Only much later I opened my little eyes. I don't even know why I went to the Éden theatre in an autumn afternoon, when it was very warm and there was plenty of sunlight. Certainly it was more due to loyalty to Ingrid Bergman (and perhaps George Sanders) than to Rossellini. But I was glued to my seat. In the end, in the miracle, I began to cry. My companions (that is, my female companions) began to laugh. At the movie and at me. How was it possible, João? I'm still amazed as to how it was possible, João. It wasn't flesh nor blood what led me to it. But some God up there in the sky. I grant that the proper one.
I spoke of my fortune, to my left and to my right. Not a single echo. To my left they said it was the stuff of catholics, in the days of greater devotion. To my right, that it was the stuff of neorealists, in the days of greater stupidity. The left had more reason than the right. In matters of content, it happens.
It took me almost a year – as I said – to find people (catholic people) that had felt the same as I did. These led me to read a notorious issue of the Cahiers, predating my screening in six months, where Jacques Rivette had written (Lettre sur Rossellini): By the appearance of Journey to Italy, all films have suddenly aged ten years, and where Éric Rohmer had said (La terre du miracle): In this film where everything seems accessory, everything, even the wildest wanderings of our spirit, are part of the essential. They led me to read Bazin, and the sacred text Défense de Rossellini.
When, in April 1958, I rewatched the film at the Jardim-Cinema, during the 26th screening of the Center for Cinema Culture, we had already formed a group defending the genius of the work. And a beautiful text by Pedro Tamen – always very pedagogical, always running away from polemics – converted more skeptics than the film itself: "Then, there is a miracle which we aren't sure wether it actually was one (a crippled man wielding his crutches) and another one which, indeed, we know it was: two people discover each other in their innermost, in their deepest, they fuse together, they are finally capable of saying yes and that they love each other, that yes, that yes, they love each other". In 1958 already, the Cahiers du Cinéma placed Journey to Italy in third place in their "Greatest films of our lives" list, after Murnau's Sunrise and Renoir's La régle du jeu.
As time passed, this avant-garde and elitist opinion stopped being so. Today, nobody is no longer scandalized by nothing. Journey to Italy is peacefully accepted as one the glories of our land (the land of cinema) and every time I program it, the theatre is sold out. There's not a single bum who dares even a minor reservation about it if he wishes to have his opinion respected. I swear to that in the name of the unanimous 5-star reviews it would get if it was re-released at the Ávila theatre. But appearances can be deceiving, and who sees the face does not see the heart – unless one's name is Roberto Rossellini, and for over eighteen years nobody is called that.
What is Journey to Italy, to those who've never seen it? As Murnau's Sunrise, as Oliveira's The convent, as Borzage's Lucky star or as Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari, it is the story of the separation and reconciliation of a couple. The Joyces, an English middle-aged couple (late 30s, early 40s), well-set in life, who come to Italy to sell a property inherited from an uncle named Homer (Joyce and Homer may be casual names, may not be). A couple they are, for they are married. A couple they are not, for they are reasonably fed up with one another. The journey – towards Naples and around Naples – lasts for seven days (magical number). Alex, the husband (George Sanders), chases skirts here and there, catches (or is caught by) a prostitute, bores himself to death. Katherine, the wife (Ingrid Bergman), tourists a lot: Naples Archeological Museum, ruins of Cuma (antro della Sibila), Temple of Apollo, Vesuvius, Pompeii, the solfatara of Pozzuoli. She remembers a poet who loved her and died young from tuberculosis, she pretends to be jealous of her husband, she is bored with him and of him. In the seventh day, after an absurd discussion regarding their Bentley, they decide to get a divorce as soon as they return to England. Hours later, the car in which they travelled while barely speaking is forced to stop due to a procession crossing the road. They exit, one at a time, to see what's happening. At a certain point, the crowd bursts into cries of "miracle" regarding the aforementioned cripple. Amidst the confusion, each of them is pushed into opposite directions. Katherine calls for her husband. When he manages to reach her, they hug and swear never to be separate again.
Neither Katherine nor Alex seem like interesting people. Nothing very particular happens to them. Anyone can see that getting a divorce is indeed the best thing they can do. A procession, a "Hail" to St. Fatima, and then the two of them into each other's arms, promising eternal love. Miracle granted by the Virgin, protecting the sanctity of marriage? Whoever hasn't seen the film and reads only this can easily understand the reactions of the time.
But saying this and saying nothing at all is practically the same thing. Not because the story isn't this, but because beneath this, parallel to this, or above this (and none of these prepositions are good), everything that is essential and impossible to translate into words takes place.
I'm not going to mention any of the more famous examples, such as Katherine's disturbance in seeing the male nudes at the Naples Museum, or her lonely walk by the Temple of Apollo, or the "ionization" at the solfatara, with the smoke and the smell suffocating her, nor the skulls in the catacombs or the discovery in the excavations in Pompeii of the calcined bodies of an embraced couple, a couple embraced for two thousand years. I won't say a word about the confusion in the streets of Naples or Capri, or of the pregnant women that constantly pass by Katherine, nor of the various marital fights these so reserved Englishmen witness and are shocked by.
I will refer only to the opening sequence, when, in the Bentley, Katherine and Alex drive towards Naples. First, a pedagogically conceived dialogue that gives us all the useful information: who they are, where they are going, what they are doing in Italy. Then, the husband falls asleep and we realize it is the woman who drives. The husband wakes up and suggests to the wife they switch places. Instead of a cut and a new shot of the car with their respective new positions, we watch as the entire switch takes place, in all its minute detail. In the second minute of the film, a second stop: now, it's a herd of cattle crossing the road what keeps them from advancing. It irritates Alex, who'd already remarked that roads in Italy are dangerous. There is a bifurcation: an arrow indicates Naples to the left and Latina to the right. The car turns left (we already knew Naples was the destination), but the camera turns right, as if the other way was the good one and they didn't know it. Soon after, Katherine looks horrified: "What is this? Blood?", and Alex answers, ironic, that it's just a fly smashed into the windshield. They talk about the dangers of malaria.
Apparently, nothing particularly interesting took place. But, in these five minutes of film, whoever is capable of seeing has already seen the essential. The journey is led by the woman, as it will always be throughout the film, for she sees almost everything the husband does not, as it is also she who calls him at the end. But without him she does not exist. Because of this, he must also drive and everything that subsequently happens to him drives the film just as much as what happens to her. At every fork, there are always two possibilities. To follow what is predetermined means to leave open the unknown. Any plan or order is taken over by disorder and by the unforeseen: oxen don't care about Bentleys, and may stop – or delay – a journey. A spot of blood may not be a tragedy but it may not be as banal as it seems. There are no symbols in life, only signs. At each moment, each sign.
And it is the accumulation of all these moments and all these signs that, at each moment and at each sign, undermine that man and that woman who seem to fatally advance one way (towards the rupture) but no less fatally advance in another (towards rediscovery). When they lose their grip (on the car, the house, the direction, the road), everything vital and mortal that had accumulated in them explodes, so irrational and so rationally as the crowd's faith in the Virgin's miracle. And it is this explosion – this eruption, this ionization, if we wish to stay by some of the film's images – what shoots them towards each other, in the same embrace of the corpses in Pompeii. Perhaps they too – what do we know? – weren't making love, nor even loved each other. Perhaps, surprised by the eruption of Vesuvius, they held on to each other so as not to die alone. But two bodies together, really together, for two thousand years or two seconds, are the total miracle. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas there is a deeper and more precise variant of the well-known passage of the synoptics where it is said that true faith moves mountains. Instead of it saying, "if you have true faith and say to the mountain 'move', the mountain shall move", it says: "If a man and a woman live in true peace with each other and one of them says to the mountain 'move', the mountain shall move". Instead of faith, charity. It is the heart of Rossellini's cinema.
Not me nor anyone else can swear to you that, once they return to the car or to the house, Alex and Katherine won't start again with their tantrums. But the miracle happened. It isn't good that a man or a woman be alone. Journey to Italy, as Rohmer said, is a drama with three characters. The third one is God. And in Journey to Italy, who doesn't see Him doesn't see anything.
It's just a film? Precisely.
– JOÃO BÉNARD DA COSTA