184. Paisà (Paisan) (1946)

Directed By Roberto Rossellini

Synopsis

The film is divided into 6 vignettes, short stories about the occupation and resistance in Italy after the allied invasion.

Review

After seeing this film the words that comes to your mind are "mixed bag". Just like in any short story collection there are a couple of very good stories and some which could have been left out.

The first story is almost a test of resilience for the viewer. The acting is terrible, the story is quite dull and it doesn't seem to go anywhere. But if you survive that you will be rewarded with progressively better stories, I would have to say that the best stories are numbers 3, 4 and 5. Those are really good sketches of live during the German occupation and the allied invasion.

Rossellini frames these tales in the context of the historical happenings of the war in little excerpts using stock footage, but then quickly moves the story from the epic to the particular and you follow some character's story.

It is this humanising level of the film that is particularly interesting, the individual dramas caught in a kind of Polaroid before moving on to the next one. It is a good film, but the unevenness of the stories lets it down ultimately.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

As he [Rossellini] declared in an interview, in order to really create the character that one has in mind, it is necessary for the director to engage in a battle with his actor which usually ends with submitting to the actor's wish. Since I do not have the desire to waste my energy in a battle like this, I only use professional actors occasionally. One of the reasons of success has been supposed to be the fact that Rossellini rewrote the scripts according to the non-professional actors' feelings and histories. Regional accent, dialect, and costumes were shown in the film how they were in real life.

Roberto Rossellini goes on vacation with Ingrid Bergman and their two children... I wonder if one of them is Isabella Rossellini: