‘Rocco and His Brothers’ or — ‘La Terra Trema’ Part II?
I was somewhat trepidatious settling down to re-watch Luchino Visconti’s ‘Rocco and His Brothers’ (1960) last night as I’d seen it only a couple of years previously so knew how emotionally pummelling and hysterical the three hour film was. I also tend to find Visconti’s movies frequently inadvertently hilarious so was curious to see how ‘Rocco’ fared a second time round in terms of daftness. Turns out it’s still pummelling, hysterical and the climax is as side-splittingly funny as most of Visconti’s work tends to be, but there’s also an undeniable power and beauty here.
Matriarch Rosaria Parondi has brought her four sons to Milan in order to escape the poverty of the South after the death of their father. The eldest brother, Vincenzo, has already established himself in the city yet is unable to offer them anything in the way of practical help meaning the family must struggle even harder to survive.
All the brothers adjust to life in the city differently: Ciro studies to work in the automobile factory; Simone finds boxing a possible route out of destitution; Rocco opts for military service. Conditions are tough but if the five brothers stick together, like the five fingers of a hand, then the Parondis stand a chance although it soon becomes apparent that the faults, frictions and fractures of society, the family and especially the human heart appear destined to annihilate this hope entirely.
‘Rocco and His Brothers’ starts in what appears to be typical Italian neorealist fashion with it focusing on the clash between South and North, rich and poor, rural and urban as we follow the Parondi’s attempts to integrate into Milanese society. Except unlike Visconti’s previous ‘La Terra Trema’ (1948) there’s nothing really neorealist about any of this in the slightest because despite the attention on an impoverished family that focus is captured through highly elaborate cinematography, expansive (and expensive) sets, gorgeous actors (some of whom couldn’t even speak Italian!) and an operatic flow (when Nadia meets her fate you can almost imagine her being showered with roses and taking curtain calls after for her performance).
Not only that but there’s hardly any emphasis on actual politics, social institutions or pressing civic issues the way directors such as Francesco Rosi would’ve furiously interrogated. Instead Visconti gradually pulls the entire gaze of the movie towards the intense love triangle between the decent, but naive, Rocco, his brutish brother Simone and the spirited Nadia to the point it almost turns ‘Rocco’ into ‘Carmen’ by way of Dostoyevsky.
This operatic sweep is further enhanced by some of the most precise, intense and downright beautiful black and white cinematography you’ll ever see. There’s a sublime moment when, during one of the rare moments of lightness, the love-struck Rocco and Nadia ride a tram carriage, but where Visconti has placed the camera means these two lovers in motion become the still point of the turning Earth and it is creation that deliriously rotates around them. It’s a beautiful moment.
Another visually jolting scene comes when a desperate Simone visits his powerful boxing promoter only to be reduced to a form of human being lower than that of a prostitute, something utterly unacceptable to Simone and the final catalyst for his actions. The scene is filmed entirely in darkness, lit only by the judging light of a TV set, and it is frightenly hypnotic with the contrast between dark and light, black and white, dazzling but also sickening as it hides acts of total exploitation we suspect are happening unseen.
This contrast between dark and light is deliberate and important. The film opens in intense blackness only to, despite the terrible events in-between, gradually open up and finally close on bright light. It’s almost as though the dark represents the various absences the Parondi’s must carry — an absence of homeland, landscape, a father — with the light being not so much a signifier of hope, as such, but more a chance to look again at the world with some form of nostalgia-free clarity.
Not that Visconti’s movie is without flaws. As with so many neorealist films it teeters on, and often falls fully into, the cusp of patronising condescension — Southern Italians are backward illiterates whilst Northern Italians are heartless vampires — to the point that if I was from Sicily watching this I’d be shouting up at the cinema screen “Well, fuck you too, Luchino!”
The treatment of the female characters is also hysterically clichéd with the family’s mother, Rosaria, being the archetypal black-clad, manipulative, demanding, shrieking matriarch whilst the poor Nadia is reduced (or would Visconti claim “elevated”?) to the sacrificial Madonna/whore.
Not only that but the ending is so emotionally over the top, so excessively histrionic that I burst out laughing at the silliness of it all. I can understand why Alain Delon has to bury his face in the pillow during the climax — because he couldn’t keep a straight face!
‘Rocco and His Brothers’ is ridiculous, crazed and emotionally unhinged but it’s also a blast to watch and the three hours fly by. This could be because despite the film’s various issues it has a phenomenally rigorously structured script which effortlessly captivates the attention and pulls us into these character’s passions and feelings with an undeniable force. The direction and cinematography are precise and exact meaning there’s an incredible flow to the images and narrative that’s almost impossible to look away from.
‘Rocco and His Brothers’ might be thought of, by some, as a late-period neorealist film but the enduring appeal here is watching Visconti blow everything up to such insane melodramatic proportions (it’s almost like Sirk) that any semblance of reality is completely destroyed and we’re left suspended in a black and white space of churning emotions and those profound absences.
