‘Bitter Rice’ or — The Americanisation of Silvana?
Giuseppe De Santis’ ‘Bitter Rice’ (1949), or ‘Riso Amaro’, opens with a gag. A serious looking man directly addresses the audience to sternly inform us of the harsh conditions endured by the female seasonal workers of northern Italy, but this documentary “reality” is immediately destroyed by the camera pulling back to reveal the man’s actually a radio announcer who’s chirpily describing live to his listeners the packed railway station the rice-pickers are departing from. This will not be a documentary lecture in any way, shape, or form but something else entirely.
We’re then hit with a series of images straight out of a gangster flick — a small-time crook and his girl, lurking cops, a diamond necklace, a gun in the small of the back, a punch, a frantic dash, a screeching train — before we’re hit with another, even more powerful jolt.
Her impact has the all-consuming force of an atomic jack-in-the-box, a rippling shock-wave of boogie-woogie made undulating flesh we cannot withstand, or even fully comprehend, suddenly appearing before us. It’s a blinding image of infinite rapture and inevitable destruction (this amount of energy is too overwhelming to be properly sustained) that’s so intense we feel the entire world holding its breath. She’s called Silvana. She’s played by Silvana Mangano. It might be the most astonishing introduction to a character in the history of film.
This earth-shattering event allows the crooks, Walter (Vittorio Gassman) and Francesca (Doris Dowling), to slip the distracted cops. He gives her the necklace and tells her to join the countless rice-pickers. He’ll meet her near the rice fields to reclaim it when the heat has died down.
What follows is a love rectangle set amongst the Po Delta rice fields where Francesca finds an opportunity for redemption through honest, collective labour whilst Silvana courts annihilation through her infatuation with glamour, crime, photo-romances, chewing-gum and American culture (although don’t be surprised if you sniff the slight whiff of hypocrisy here because it’s blindingly obvious that the only person more infatuated with American music and film than Silvana is De Santis himself). This isn’t just a clash over gems or lovers but a collision between an “authentic” Italian way of life and an invading American media; of community vs. individual desire.
All this comes together in the film’s most devastating scene where our emotions are taken into the realm of the unbearable. Two terrible events occur simultaneously during a violent storm and both are beyond consolation, but whereas one woman receives solidarity through the physical act of collective singing this scant comfort is denied Silvana, someone who consumes music purely from her American gramophone, an inhuman machine, so must suffer her pain alone. Hearing these two agonising laments blend together — one from a group, the other a lone individual — is psychologically cataclysmic.
‘Bitter Rice’ is as striking visually as it is sonically. Majestic crane shots, gliding tracking moves, audacious pans are edited together with cuts of an explosive rhythm. There’s a thermal flash of a scene where Walter and Silvana dance for a second time, except now they both know exactly where this dancing will ultimately lead, and the editing is so fierce, so kinetic and volcanic it’s practically avant-garde (apparently this sequence took De Santis and his editor months to complete).
Another jaw-dropping moment is when, near the end, Walter is revealed at the crescendo of his maximum lethality by a carcass splitting open in front of him like a parting flesh-curtain of death, the rest of the slaughterhouse scattered with disembodied limbs and severed heads.
It might open with a stolen necklace but ‘Bitter Rice’ is about so much more. Yet I’m not fully convinced it’s about the plight of manual labourers, the Americanisation of Italian culture or a plea for the authentic over surface imitation either because the film possesses an erotic charge of such oceanic intensity it almost obliterates any further consideration. So what is it about? I suspect it’s about Silvana and what she represents, and that’s the undeniable pleasure of extraordinary cinema. And this is extraordinary cinema.
