‘Tormento’ or — The Astonishingly Cathartic Fairy Tale Melodrama?
If I was to describe the plot to Raffaello Matarazzo’s ‘Tormento’ (1950) it would sound like your typical melodramatic fodder where a young couple, Anna (Yvonne Sanson) and Carlo (Amedeo Nazzari), are wrenched apart when he is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and she must therefore suffer a series of ever increasing hardships. Yet it’s all so perfectly crafted and energetically powered with Matarazzo designing every moment for maximum emotional impact that it blasts you through the wall with its sheer momentum. Sure, it’s a tale of ordinary people in an ordinary world but there’s nothing ordinary about ‘Tormento’ in the slightest.
A cool twist Matazzaro gives on this domestic scenario is to combine it with the fairy tale. This is most evident in the character of Anna’s wicked stepmother (an excellent Tina Lattanzi who actually dubbed the Evil Queen in Disney’s ‘Snow White’ for Italian audiences). This transforms Anna into an almost Cinderella-like figure although one firmly rooted in a recognisable reality meaning you don’t need to be a royal princess to identify with her but only a wife, a daughter or a mother.
And this stepmother puts Anna through bloody torture, even though it’s also a case of both Anna and Carlo suffering a never ending cascade of bad luck (“Why is this happening to me? I haven’t done anything wrong!” is the film’s oft-repeated lament). It could easily be unbearably depressing but Matazzaro’s pacing is so furiously dynamic we’re totally hooked!
A fantastic example of this blistering tempo is the scene when Anna’s father receives a letter from his estranged daughter asking why he hasn’t replied to any of her previous correspondences. Suddenly realising that his wife has been hiding Anna’s letters to him by stuffing them in her bra and that she is, in fact, an evil and wicked woman he explodes in rage and throws her out of the house… only to suffer a fatal heart-attack in the process. With his dying breath he gets his wife to swear on the crucified Lord that she will look after and raise his daughter and, after she grudgingly does so, he immediately pops his clogs, wrenching the crucifix from her grasp in the process and leaving her gazing at her empty hand which now resembles a hideously clenched claw. Gazing at it she lets out a shrieking scream of horror at what she has just done.
It’s amazing and this all takes place in only roughly a minute or so. And the entire film is like that!
Other pleasures include Matarazzo’s use of music (the scene where Anna is working in a nightclub’s kitchen and as she’s washing the dishes can hear the plaintive love song the performer on-stage is singing is wonderful) as well as one of the most jaw-dropping moments of emotional manipulation you can imagine. It’s when Anna is forced to stay in a home for wayward women and the Mother Superior won’t let her briefly leave to see her daughter outside. Anna accuses the Mother Superior of knowing nothing of a mother’s pain to which the nun replies that she knows the pain only too well as before she took her vows she gave birth to a little girl only for the infant to die shortly after. Anna then seizes this opportunity and begins openly praying, IN FRONT OF THE MOTHER SUPERIOR, to the nun’s dead baby and asking the “angeletto” in heaven to convince her mother to allow Anna to see her own daughter here on earth. It’s a jaw-dropping example of guilt tripping, but is it any different from the guilt-trips the nuns have been playing on Anna? You go, girl!
All this intensity builds to a climax which might the most astonishingly powerful case of emotional catharsis I’ve ever experienced. Without giving too much away, it goes something like this –
Anna is languishing in the convent, apparently dying from a broken heart. The Mother Superior reassures Anna that she will soon see her daughter again… just not in this life. A nearby choir sings like a host of heavenly angels as the Mother Superior instructs Anna to call out to her child as her time of suffering is coming to an end. Anna, feverishly looking into the great beyond, says she can indeed see her daughter. She can hear her, her angel, coming closer and so deliriously opens her arms for her. The poor thing has lost her mind!
Yet Matarazzo knows Anna, or the audience, won’t be satisfied with hollow fantasy and so instantaneously shatters and explodes delusion into joyous reality and the sudden cathartic release is so rapturous I wanted to burst into tears, cheer like crazy, stand to my feet shouting “Bravo!” and start showering the screen with flowers.
As soon as this happens the words ‘FINE!’ appear and the audience is left on a remarkable high. Now THAT’S how you end a movie!
