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Sometimes an epiphany is a light breeze, says Roberto Rossellini, and at others it is a volcano in full eruption. It opens with the words of Isaiah, postwar Europe is an opportunistic Lithuanian refugee (Ingrid Bergman) in an internment camp, just the latest stop in a life of displacement. Romance through barbed wire is her escape, she marries the Sicilian POW (Mario Vitale) only to find a new prison in their island home. "La terra è dura qui," warns the local padre, nothing grows on these crumbly shores and nobody much cares for her lack of modesty: Paint the blank walls and be bathed in scorn, talk to the lighthouse operator and get beaten by your husband, "a nice, simple boy." The camera stares as Bergman sobs, a baby cries in the distance and the scorched landscape bears down from every side, even Renoir's dying bunny has a cameo. "With me, God has never been merciful." The survivor's progression is an increasingly visceral dialogue with her environment, a sulfurous summit awaits at the end of her search for wholeness. The fishing sequence—men wait in canoes, nets are raised, the gray ocean surface turns foamy and bloody with huge speared tuna—is an astonishing set-piece closer to Hawks' Tiger Shark than to Visconti's La Terra Trema. The filmmaker's supreme documentary achievement, however, rests in the recording of his irritable inamorata, a thorny snapshot of a Nordic Hollywood goddess awkwardly traipsing through neorealist terrain and, in the process, delivering one of the medium's great performances. "You can't go from one extreme to another... All I want now is a little happiness!" A pivotal bedrock formation for Antonioni and no mistake. Smoke and lava nearly blot out the screen, a morning wind cuts through fear and doubt to leave Rossellini's credo: "What mystery. What beauty." Cinematography by Otello Martelli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |