EVERYDAY LIFE OPERA: Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960, co-wri & dir by Luchino Visconti, w/ Alain Delon, Annie Giradot, Claudia Cardinale, Italy, 177mns)
Some movies you come to right away. Some take half a lifetime to be ready for.
Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, a masterpiece of Italian post-neorealism, was a movie this writer wasn't ready for until he was 47.
It is a bracing and profound movie. Driven by currents of melodrama and emotion until exploding into a tempest of near-operatic intensity, ROCCO is also intimate-a story of one family trying to keep its head above the raging tides of change, urbanization, and societal judgement.
Visconti, born an Italian aristocrat, is a kind of Franklin Delano Roosevelt of film. Comfortable and understanding of money and the rich yet compelled by the struggle of the poor, Visconti made movies about all the classes struggling in the ever-changing now.
Interestingly, two of his most famous movies, 1963's THE LEOPARD and 1960's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, while seemingly different on the surface, deal with some of the same themes: notably, how a family deals with the merciless march of society and progress.
The story is timeless: a rural family, consisting of a recently widowed proud mother and her five sons, moves from the countryside to pulsing big city Milan in the hopes of changing its fortunes.
Rocco (Alain Delon) & Nadia (Annie Giradot) are two parts of a triangle that ground Visconti’s movie in the immense complexities of human psychology so hard to express in cinema.
Each brother gets a titlecard at some point in the movie. There's the already domesticated Vincenzo, starting a family with Milanese girlfriend Ginietta. Saintly Rocco (Alain Delon) always trying to solve the problems of the family. Primal Simone with a talent for boxing but a weakness for women, alcohol, living beyond his means. Driven Ciro who pragmatically takes a job at a car factory. And adolescent Luca, the baby brother, who watches the struggles of his older brothers.
The movie soon focuses on Simone, his destructive relationship with Nadia (Annie Giradot in possibly the movie's most captivating performance) who is sliding into prostitution, and Rocco who nearly compels Nadia to a better life with his innate goodness before more primal forces complicate everything.
Real life always finds us breaking good and breaking bad, most of us doing so simultaneously our entire lives. The power of ROCCO is its ability to cinematically express this complexity of human emotion, psychology, agency.
It's hard sometimes to know whether the movie itself believes some of the problematic views espoused by its characters. Nadia is blamed, pitied, chastized as a corrupting element in the Parondi family. But Giradot's performance and Visconti's direction make her as Magdalene like and Christ-like as Rocco in a strange way.
The family, the indiividual, society, classism, Rocco & His Brothers deals with it all.
Nadia is an incredibly complex character of self-destruction who is as, if not more, compelling as any of the brothers.
Watching ROCCO, one realizes that Martin Scorsese may have been just as influenced by this movie as ON THE WATERFRONT when making RAGING BULL. Much of ROCCO revolves around the world of boxing. The juxtopposition of boxing matches with scenes of domestic strife and struggle feels like more than just a small inspiration for the same strategy in Scorsese's 1980 masterpiece.
Visconti is a more removed and hard to pin down moviemaker to write about than say a Federico Fellini. Visconti is concerned and focused on complex systems, the brutality of society, the inevitability of change. He dares to make these the topics of his movies.
They are important ideas, hard to express cinematically.
Still, ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS is a bracing, operatic look at how families are rising and falling at the same time. Visconti's ability to situate the individual in the broader canvas of a society and time is incredible.
This writer almost certainly would have been unable to appreciate that in his younger days. But now, in middle age, this writer shudders at the necessity and importance of such observations in our works of art.
It's hard to do but critical. ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS is a masterpiece of the micro and the macro.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.