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Textbook plus storybook, thus the woodcut matte of Renaissance Florence in the distance, an enchanted view. Illumination begins in darkness, a wake for the head of the Medici house as intrigue is murmured among the guests. Cosimo de Medici (Marcello di Falco) is a cunning chess player, even in exile he continues the machinations that will curtail local conflict and solidify the church. (There's a whiff of Mafia to his ruthlessness, a few flashes of abrupt violence jangle the serene flow.) "Il centro del mondo," bags of gold and painterly simulacra. "For whom was this magnificence made?" Roberto Rossellini's mysterious utopia, a balance of commerce and art like no studio he ever worked at. The well-oiled economic system is admired sardonically by the traveler who's been to the corners of the globe, to "make robbery ethical, avarice a philosophy" is quite the achievement. Joan of Arc is heard about from a soldier on the road, Dante is recited and Donatello's workshop is seen, Masaccio's frescoes are critiqued and exalted. Leon Battista Alberti (Virgilio Gazzolo) has the right idea, "the old and the new connected by a relationship of continuity," he talks like an architect and sets out to restore the rubble of Rome. God and the universe and the microcosm of man, matters of perspective. (Cinema itself is pondered in the early illusionism of a magic box, Alberti dispels its mysticism to reveal "a system of mirrors.") The technique is transcendent, the leisurely camera movement of a continuous line of thought—a curving pan around the pulpit followed by a reverse track and flattened by a slow zoom (cf. Preminger's The Cardinal). After the tenebrous agonies of Blaise Pascal, the most hopeful of Rossellini's experimental time-machines crystallizes the auteur's thrust: "It is right to discuss the search for truth." With Tom Felleghy, Mario Erpichini, Adriano Amidei Migliano, John Stacy, Sergio Nicolai, Michel Bardinet, and Fred Ward.
--- Fernando F. Croce |