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Two fierce sketches from Roberto Rossellini, "un omaggio all'arte di Anna Magnani." Cocteau's La Voix Humaine for the first, or rather La Faccia Umana as the camera investigates the distraught diva's visage as if inventing the close-up. (Bergman and Warhol take note of the experiment.) A bedroom is the tigress' cage, a whole melodrama compressed into a couple of desperate calls, the phone receiver the raft to which the heroine clings. Disinterested lover on the other end of the line and black lapdog as silent witness, love "has cost me, but I don't regret it." Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number is a concurrent tour de force, the effect is that of a tower crumbling to pebbles and a stifling set being flooded by emotion. Telefoni-bianchi cinema cracked open, beginning on a mirror reflection and ending on an image out of Ulmer's Detour. "Back I go to silence and darkness..." An open-air stage in the other fable, Il Miracolo, as scandalous and pure as Godard's Je vous salue, Marie. Magnani in peasant drag amidst goats, up the hill comes blond-bearded Federico Fellini as the vagabond who might be St. Joseph. She describes the fire within while he nods and pulls out a wine bottle, a fade to black links her inflamed face and her abandoned body. Blessed by a saint or fucked by a con man? Pregnancy summons the village's scorn, she's driven away in a Via Dolorosa complete with bowl for a halo. (Fellini helps himself to some of the agitation in Le Notti di Cabiria.) Into the wilderness for the holy birth, "those are divine designs, right?" The human condition or the actress' quest, there's no difference for the director of miracles. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |