The marriage between flighty romantic Wanda and the overly practical Ivan was never going to be an easy one, though at least the wild romp across Rome that emerges from their odd mismatch of values brings both newlyweds down to earth – and the light amusement it offers to those looking in from the outside doesn’t hurt either. While Ivan has planned their honeymoon down to the exact minute, Wanda’s eyes have turned to handsome celebrity Fernando Rivoli, star of the soap opera photo strip ‘The White Sheik’. Surely it won’t be too much of an issue if she disappears for a few hours to see him, she presumes, thereby leaving Ivan alone to meet with his relatives, devise a string of excuses for her disappearance, and track her down before their imminent appointment with the Pope.
The White Sheik may be a minor effort from Federico Fellini in his early career, but to those acquainted with the Italian director’s later work, this romantic comedy also holds the key to his artistic development. In his eyes, modern day Rome is a city of glorious contradictions, infused with an air of classical romanticism that runs counter to the lies and pretensions of its morally ambiguous citizens. His filmmaking here is not true neorealism, and at this point he does not yet possess the impressive stylistic command of his mentors, but his roots in the movement are nonetheless evident in his location shooting around Rome’s streets and architectural landmarks. He evidently knows how to wield this setting in key moments, at one point cutting through a brief montage of the city’s angel statues around Wanda after having her heart broken, and yet denying any immediate salvation as they turn their backs to both her and the camera.
In this moment, it feels as if the comforting, open arms of Christianity are closed, leaving Wanda to wallow in her misery. Fellini would later interrogate the shallow pretensions of modern-day theology with greater formal acuity in La Dolce Vita, further exploring Rome as a morally broken cesspool of hypocrites, and yet beyond this scene The White Sheik also lays out that groundwork through the cultural intertwining of religion and celebrity. In this city, God is constantly displaced by whatever new, substanceless attraction seduces fans with their dazzling looks, with the hottest star at this point in time being handsome photo strip star Rivoli.
Even the very name that this deceptively charming actor adopts as his heroic character is meaningless in its cultural contradiction, with the ‘White Sheik’ applying an artificial Western lens to Middle Eastern culture for no good reason other than the exotic appeal. Of course, Wanda can’t resist – she is ready to impulsively sail away with him for an ocean adventure, and eat up his tall tale of being brainwashed into an unhappy marriage through a love potion. Only when his actual wife arrives and exposes his lies does the blinding façade fall away to reveal a pathetic, empty man desperately trying to live up to his legend, thereby ending Wanda’s romantic dreams.
Meanwhile, Ivan’s ordeal back at the hotel realising his wife has run away pushes him far outside his comfort zone to do something he has never done before – improvise. For better and worse, Fellini clearly delights in the broad comedy of this storyline more than the other, straining Ivan’s ability to keep his cool demeanour under extreme duress. He can only cover for Wanda’s absence so much before his inquisitive relatives begin to see through the lies about her apparent sickness, and eventually his mental exhaustion begins to spill out into slapstick when he is comically caught up in a marching band that almost runs him over. Unfortunately, Leopoldo Trieste’s constant mugging of the camera with a stunned gaze does not play out so well comedically, and he is even outdone by Giulietta Masina cameoing as the same character she would later play in Nights of Cabiria.
With Wanda recognising the emptiness of her dreams and Sven learning the value of flexibility, Fellini effectively reunites the newlywedded couple under their original plan to visit St Peter’s Basilica and see the Pope. His allegory for marriage’s holy union is transparent but well-earned, seeing both spouses overcome their flaws, and ultimately grow closer to God in this finale. Rome may be a city of famous icons and worldly distractions in The White Sheik, and yet there is still divine redemption to be found by those who seek it out in the right places.
The White Sheik is currently available to purchase as a DVD or Blu-ray on Amazon.
Even after pensioner Umberto D. Ferrari is threatened with eviction, kicked out of his hospital bed, and forced through the trials of losing and recovering his dog, it is surprising to find that he still has the pride to reject the smallest help from strangers. As he stands outside the Pantheon, he sheepishly wrestles with the prospect of begging, before thrusting his hand out at a passerby. The shame is almost instant – as soon as the man reaches into his pocket to take out a few bills, Umberto averts his gaze and flips his hand over, pretending to test for rain.
It is hardly his fault that he has fallen on such hard times, especially given the bleak social conditions of post-war Rome that have sent masses into poverty. Still, the disgrace of his own inadequacy is harrowing. This should be the time of his life that he is enjoying retirement, and this grand city of immensely rich history and culture should be the perfect place for that. The paradox of its beautiful, ancient architecture coexisting alongside this elderly man’s struggles in Umberto D. though is united under a very simple yet powerful visual conceit within Vittorio de Sica’s mise-en-scène. Rome’s urban landscape of stone columns and vast domes may be majestic in its imposing visual backdrops, but there is little consolation to be found in its cold, harsh discomfort.
Poverty and shame as Umberto decides against begging at the last second, and the Pantheon strikes an imposing backdrop to it all.
Italian neorealism was definitively on the way out by 1952, and by this point de Sica had already directed what is arguably the movement’s most seminal film, Bicycle Thieves, yet there is nothing in Umberto D. to suggest that his talents had dwindled. Its black-and-white location shooting through Rome’s streets and plazas is as robust as ever, imprinting Carlo Battisti’s sorrowful face in low angles against apartment buildings, and shrinking his feeble stature beneath towering obelisks. Equally crucial to de Sica’s imagery as well is the constant bustle of everyday life surrounding Umberto – in fact, it is hard to find any public space that isn’t crawling with workers on scaffolding, children playing games, or trains speeding through backgrounds.
A cornerstone of Italian neorealism in the use of authentic architecture and the naturalistic blocking, supported a great deal by the crisp depth of field – the harsh stone structures offer little comfort in this ancient city.
De Sica is all too aware of the irony in Umberto’s emotional isolation here, given the fervent activity and density of the city around him. There is little empathy to be found anywhere along the social ladder, from the unseen government bureaucrats with their scant welfare payments, to Umberto’s own landlady who renovates his apartment without warning. Her plan is to make one giant living room in the building, but right now the giant hole in the bedroom wall is nothing more than a visual manifestation of his crumbling life, and a crude opening through which de Sica’s camera sensitively frames his loss of dignity.
Umberto is a prisoner in his own home, claustrophobically framed in its hallways and through the hole in his wall.
At the very least, there is some comfort to be found in Umberto’s few companions. Just as Maria, the landlady’s maid, helps his situation as much as she can from her limited position, he too is determined to find the father of her unborn baby so that she may have some financial support. Both she and Umberto may belong to entirely different generations, but there is no competition between his encroaching homelessness and her teenage pregnancy. Instead, this elderly man and young woman share a common empathy for each other’s troubles, generating their own warmth in an otherwise hostile environment.
Even with such high narrative stakes though, the soul-crushing mundanity of day-to-day survival bleeds through in Umberto D. De Sica plays it out with an understated sincerity, recognising that everyday responsibilities do not disappear simply because one’s welfare is in peril, and even spends four minutes studying Maria’s internalised pain as she makes herself coffee. It takes her three strikes of the match before it lights up, though before she gets it to the gas stove, it snuffs out. Two more strikes do the job, and with the fire now burning she stops by the window to gaze outside at the dilapidated apartment buildings neighbouring her own. Over at the sink, she takes a quick drink from the tap before filling the kettle and placing it on the stove. She pauses, her hands reaching down to caress her belly, and then as she sits down to grind the coffee beans, we register the streak of single tear on her cheek. The moment the doorbell rings though, she is snapped out of her poignant reverie, and quickly rubs her face clean before answering.
Several minutes are spent watching Maria make coffee, as de Sica lets the subdued emotion naturally rise to the surface – a huge reaction against the heightened Hollywood movies of the era.
In an era that saw Hollywood blowing emotions such as these up into enormous Technicolor musicals and melodramas, de Sica was expressing them as uncomfortable interruptions to his characters’ efforts to stay alive. It is clear to see how much texture these tiny formal details bring to his characters, layering their journeys with struggles beyond their primary objectives. It is only incidental that Umberto’s apartment is infested with ants and that his sleep is constantly disturbed by loud noises from outside the building, as these facts of life sink into the background along with the threat of any future war. After all, there are only so many things one man can invest in emotionally before letting everything else fall by the wayside.
Carlo Battisti’s face is a vessel of empathy for the audience, bearing the weight of multiple burdens as he lays down to a restless sleep.
Even with all these pressures falling on Umberto’s shoulders though, it tells us a lot about his character that he doesn’t even think twice to prioritise finding his dog the moment he learns of his escape. Where children were typically used in other neorealist films as emblems of innocence, here Flike represents everything pure and good that the world has to lose should it continue along its path to total degradation. Umberto’s relief upon finding his best friend at the pound is immense, though the imagery there is harsh. With dogs being hoisted up their necks, kept in small cages, and shoved into incinerators, de Sica effectively draws bleak visual parallels to the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The aftershocks of World War II are evidently still reverberating across Europe.
Visceral imagery of concentration camps at the dog pound, never quite letting go of Europe’s recent history.
As long as goodness exists in a world burdened by historical trauma though, there is also hope for Umberto. No matter how hard he tries to hand his dog off to someone else, he simply will not leave his side, right up until he finds himself trapped in his master’s grip in the path of an oncoming train. Just as Umberto rescued Flike from certain death at the pound, Flike similarly saves him from suicide here, squirming out of his arms and leading him off the tracks.
The trust between man and animal has been momentarily broken, but as a result the roles have been swapped. It is now Umberto chasing after his disillusioned dog, marking the opposite dynamic of what we witnessed just a few minutes earlier. It takes genuine remorse and humility to restore that connection, but the fact that it can be mended at all speaks to the uniqueness of this relationship that responds to betrayal with compassionate mercy – a quality that is scarce to be found elsewhere in this amoral environment. While the rest of the world crumbles in Umberto D., de Sica emphasises the crucial role that our humanity plays in keeping us alive, distilling this warm, poignant sentiment down to a lonely man and his dog playing side by side in his very last shot.
A stunning final frame with the low horizon, towering trees, and Umberto happily disappearing into the background with Flike.
Umberto D. is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Between the three short stories adapted in Le Plaisir, a span of eight years separates their original publication in the 1880s. Being that these were products of an incredibly fertile period for French author Guy de Maupassant, he did not intend them as a thematic trilogy, yet Max Ophüls nonetheless identifies a common thread in each that he weaves through even more purposefully with laughter and sorrow. Such a delicate balance of tones is essential to his film’s overarching thesis – that pleasure may exist in the absence of true happiness. This, he posits, is a much rarer gift. Armed with a camera that moves with all the elegance of a gentle breeze, and a sophisticated charm that lightly alternates between comedy and tragedy, Ophüls lays out his parables of elderly men, young prostitutes, and jaded lovers seeking out their own forms of gratification in late 19th century France.
An omniscient narrator voiced by Jean Servais is our guide through these worlds, lifting passages straight from Maupassant’s stories to form the main basis of the script, while screenwriter Jacques Natanson works with Ophüls to compose the overarching framework. In each instance, the indulgences of our primary characters encounter some other humanistic ideal, starting with the “meeting of pleasure and love” in ‘La Masque.’
Ophüls is one of the greatest innovators of camera movement in history, and he lets it dance and twirl here with the mysterious Monsieur Ambroise in the decadent nightclub.
There, we are invited into the “rough, boisterous fun” of an elaborate club, within which men and women from across age and class boundaries dance to a lively orchestra. Ophüls isn’t one to deny his audience that excitement either. His mobile camera is entirely liberated here, eagerly tracking patrons who mull around the streets outside with lengthy dolly shots, and eventually dancing with them in the large, ornate hall. Perhaps there is even a bit of Josef von Sternberg in his cluttered production design of curved archways and flamboyant embellishments, though this aesthetic is far more luxurious than his Austrian counterpart’s imposing expressionism. On the occasion that he does deliver static shots, they often land at skewed angles, implicitly giving the impression that we are still moving with restless, garish scenery.
Canted angles and visual obstructions all through the club like a Josef von Sternberg film, crowding his shots with stunning production design.
The entrance of a mysterious, masked dandy who announces himself as the “great quadrille dancer, Monsieur Ambroise” draws eyes with his clumsy but enthusiastic dancing, and soon enough we become one with his movements, twirling and pivoting to the tune of upbeat strings. Only when he collapses in exhaustion and has his mask pulled off do we discover the face of an ageing man pining for the romance and energy of his youth. Meanwhile, his wife at home toils away to support his selfish habit. “I want him to live and carry on dancing,” she insists, revealing the love which upholds his pleasure.
The second tale our narrator imparts is ‘La Maison Tellier’, where a “meeting of pleasure and purity” unfolds at the First Communion of Madam Tellier’s niece, attended by all the prostitutes who work at her brothel. Ophüls’ inclination towards the perspectives of female characters would often see his films branded as ‘women’s pictures’, though this says more about the historical era he was working in than anything else. His depiction of these ladies offers them respect and complexity in equal measures, introducing them one by one by means of a crane shot that scales the walls of the building they work inside, and peers in through the windows. The curtains, blinds, and grilles which obstruct our view make for some particularly luscious frames here, keeping us at a distance from their work. Only when they exit the premises and embark on their lengthy train journey are those visual barriers removed.
Ophüls’ camera scales the side of this multi-story brothel and gazes through the windows, letting us meet each of the prostitutes while keeping the blinds, curtains, and grilles between them and the camera.
This community of amiable women makes for an amusing contrast to the male clients they leave back home, who start bickering over tax collector benefits the moment they are left alone. At the home of Tellier’s brother, Joseph, they lie awake in darkness, excited yet anxious for what awaits them the following day at church. At least there is come comfort to be found in Servais’ voiceover, poetically describing the “peaceful, penetrating silence that reached to the stars” on this quiet night.Though he often tells us exactly what we can see for ourselves, his narration acts as a companion to Ophüls’ stunning visuals, leading us from one deeply affecting composition to the next with lyrical grace. When we finally arrive at the Holy Communion, it leaves an even greater impact, hinting at a divine transcendence as we glide over the churchgoers and study the religious iconography surrounding them.
“Something superhuman seemed to hover above their heads, an all-pervading spirit, the powerful breath of an invisible, all-powerful being.”
Ophüls lands several remarkable compositions as the women lie awake in the darkness, creating a delicate dream space.
Eventually, the camera drifts back down to the faces of those lining the pews, each one moved by the deep sentiment of their visitors who are now brought to tears by the blessing of some mysterious, holy presence. Here, they are respected like any other woman, and even venerated as new members of Joseph’s family. Of the three tales presented in Le Plaisir, this is by far the longest, but it also acts as a subversion of the other two. While the first and final stories mirror each other in man’s attempt to draw happiness from their selfish indulgences, the women of ‘La Maison Tellier’ become physical emblems of pleasure, venturing forth from their home to find a pure, spiritual happiness.
Superb use of religious iconography at the church as the voiceover speaks of the divine, uniting pleasure and purity.
“Shall we now see pleasure confront death? Not a physical but a moral death,” our narrator rhetorically asks us, leading into the final tale of ‘Le Modèle’. For the first time too he reveals himself onscreen, taking part in the story as the friend of our main character – Jean the painter. Jean is infatuated with Joséphine from the moment he sees her, even before he discovers that she is a model. To him their romance is fated, and she quickly becomes his muse.
The story of their relationship’s breakdown is a simple one, as she becomes impatient with his introspective silences, and he grows frustrated with her constant talking. As always though, it is the pure stylistic panache of Ophüls filmmaking which fills this drama with such grand emotion, effortlessly shifting the camera between cinematic paintings that our main character could have created and instilling them with an incredibly rich depth of field. When the lovers’ mutual contempt reaches breaking point, Ophüls feverishly forces us into a wildly unhinged POV shot through Joséphine’s eyes, rushing up several flights of stairs and plummeting us out a window to meet the ground below.
Ophüls has an admirable dedication to an aesthetic – the skewed camera angles, eloquent camera movements, and visual obstructions are used all through Le Plaisir to great effect.
Her incidental survival ends their story on a strangely bittersweet note. Whether Jean’s decision to marry her is out of sympathy or a genuine change of heart, their future nonetheless looks stripped of the passion they once felt. As our narrator stands on the sidewalk with a friend and watches them pass by, he too ends his tale.
“He found love, glory, and fortune. Isn’t that happiness?
“Still, it’s very sad.”
“But my friend, there’s no joy in happiness.”
It is hard to imagine a filmmaker so suited to Maupassant’s eloquent literary prose as Ophüls, who finds a perfect formal match between these classical fables and his fluent, sweeping camerawork. True happiness for these characters can only be found in the absence of self-gratification, though it is so often the latter which they pursue to distract from their deep-rooted malaise. Only by separating oneself from such indulgent temptations can that special rarity be found in Le Plaisir – a state of true contentment, divorced from fleeting pleasures of a material world.
Le Plaisir is currently streaming in The Criterion Channel.
Death has come slowly for government worker Kanji Watanabe, settling over his monotonous life long before he receives his stomach cancer diagnosis. To his younger co-worker, Toyo, he is known as “the Mummy,” plodding through familiar routines like a tired, thoughtless creature reluctantly tied to the mortal world. After briefly taking offence, he accepts the accuracy of the metaphor. It has been a long time since he felt the vitality that comes with innovation, altruism, and human connection – thirty years, to be exact, as that is when he began working in the Public Affairs division at City Hall. A prison built from endless stacks of paper wrap around his office desk in an oppressive display of mise-en-scène, and from a reverse shot Akira Kurosawa brings careful precision to his blocking of colleagues on either side of him like guards. Ikiru is far from the samurai films he is most known for, and yet the Japanese auteur brings the same formal grandeur to this existential search for life’s meaning as he does in his sprawling historical epics.
A prison cell of paper stacks, and colleagues lined up like guards – as always, Kurosawa is purposeful with his mise-en-scène, turning actors into part of his scenery.
For such a pensive character study, Kurosawa keeps us at an unusual distance from Watanabe’s first-hand experience. We are led into this story by an omniscient voiceover informing us of his tumour before even he finds out, which itself pays homage to Ikiru’s literary roots in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. For a time though, we do disappear into his own subjective memories of the past, reflecting on his failures as a single father following his wife’s death.
The sight of a baseball bat triggers a flashback to a game his son, Mitsuo, played in as a young boy and struck out on. Kurosawa’s match cut back to the present via a pair of close-ups reveal a man who once felt disappointment in his son, and yet is now overcome with remorse. So too does he recall his abandonment of Mitsuo the day of his appendicitis surgery, prioritising “other things” he had to do. It is telling how little the details of those distractions have stuck around in his memory. Ikiru’s third-person narration is savage in its judgement, declaring that this lonely father has been so caught up in “the minutia of the bureaucratic machine and the meaningless busyness it breeds” that “in reality, he does nothing at all.”
Kurosawa’s typically superb editing does not disappear outside his thrilling samurai films. This match cut from the past to present reveals a huge shift in Watanabe’s disposition.
Only when Watanabe sees the final months of his life slipping away does his silent discontent start to worm its way out of his subconscious, and assert itself at the forefront of his mind. Kurosawa has always drawn magnificent performances out of his actors, and Takashi Shimura is no exception here, whose existential anxiety is etched into the lines on his ageing face, now visibly haunted by his own impending demise. His eyes widen with terror, as if cutting through time to see the truth of his wasted past and future, and desperately searching for some way he can change his legacy.
His encounters with two separate figures of wisdom shine a light forward. The first is a quirky novelist he meets in a pub who resolves to become a beneficent Mephistopheles – the demonic wish-granter of the Faust legend – though one who won’t ask for his soul in return. Their journey through the urban nightlife begins Watanabe’s solemn awakening, and Kurosawa brings a delicate beauty to these scenes, passing city lights across car windows and gently ascending his camera up to the top storey of a club. There, he invokes a magical silence among its patrons with a simple song request to the pianist. As ‘Gondola no Uta’ plays, he quietly sings of life’s beauty and brevity, and tears spring to his eyes. There are few scenes in film history that are so purely moving as this melancholy musical rendition, which may only be beaten by its reprise later in the film.
City lights passing across the car windows as Watanabe searches for hope in its nightlife.Simply one of the great performances of the 1950s. Takashi Shimura’s face is etched with worry lines of existential anxiety, later fading as he uncovers a deeper purpose to his shortened life.
When the sun rises, he happens upon his second guide, Toyo, who is handing in her resignation with the resolution that life is too short to waste in such a soul-sucking bureaucracy. After begging her for the secret to her enthusiasm, the answer is revealed to be quite simple – she spends her free time making children’s toys. Therein lies the inspiration he needs to change his entire trajectory.
Kurosawa is incredibly efficient in his storytelling, as a scene we can only have assumed early on is pure exposition returns later as a major plot point. A proposal for clearing out a cesspool and replacing it with a park makes the rounds at City Hall, with each department passing off responsibility onto another and thereby leaving it on a constant loop of inaction. In this montage of endless wipe transitions, it is almost comical just how frustrating the situation is, though this is not some isolated demonstration of the government’s incompetence. The construction of this park becomes Watanabe’s life goal in his remaining months, seeing it through to its end – and then after a time jump forward to its completion at about the 90-minute mark, he passes away.
Kurosawa’s deep focus lens assists greatly in his stunning arrangements of actors, keeping up the muscular visual through Watanabe’s funeral.
It is an audacious shift in narrative that Kurosawa implements here, and an incredibly inspired one at that. Much like the opening narration, we are placed in the hands of a party observing Watanabe’s life from the outside, though these voices are far from objective. At his funeral, colleagues congregate and ponder what brought about his sudden shift in disposition, and in the formal piecing together of their personal memories, Ikiru effectively transforms into a Citizen Kane-like study of man’s depth and unknowability.
Shimura brings a refreshing energy to Watanabe as we move into flashbacks, commanding the attention of the camera as he bustles down hallways.
Quite notably, Watanabe had never told anyone of his illness. He was found frozen to death in the park he built, and only when an autopsy was conducted did it become publicly known that he had cancer, leaving everyone to wonder whether even he was aware of his illness. Surely he did, some reason, given his reinvigoration. In these flashbacks, we notice a slouch gradually take hold of his weakened shoulders, but no longer is his face turned downwards in a permanent pout. He is more persistent than ever, physically chasing down colleagues in hallways about deadlines until they are deliberately avoiding him.
A gorgeous arrangement of the frame – Shimura slumped in the foreground, trapped on either side by fellow bureaucrats, and that paper prison continuing to lurk in the background.
“Only his work was keeping him alive,” one man claims, recalling how hands-on Watanabe was on the park project from start to finish. Even on a rainy day, he went out there with the women who first put forward the proposal, huddling beneath umbrellas to see his vision spring to life. Kurosawa uses the weather to illustrate the uphill journey from here, as later someone else recalls how he paused while out on a walk to look at the sunset for “the first time in thirty years.” The transcendence of the moment is matched with an elegant low angle, slowly tracking the camera forward on the pair of silhouettes gazing into the distance.
Kurosawa slowly tracks his camera forward in this low angle, absorbing the sunset view as it catches Watanabe’s attention.
This is the sort of crisp, perfectly composed imagery that one can expect from Kurosawa during his fruitful 1950s period, infusing his cinematography with a rich depth of field which emphasises his intricately layered blocking, and yet it shouldn’t be taken for granted in Ikiru. Even the film’s most minor players are characterised by their staging, staggered across layers of the frame. Meanwhile, this deep focus also renders Watanabe’s existential journey with melancholy detail, at one point contrasting it against a joyous birthday party in the background.
Kurosawa uses his full depth of field in this meeting between Watanabe and Toyo, contrasting his melancholy demeanour against the birthday party in the background.
Perhaps the most profound use of this ambitious technique though is that shot which arrives towards the film’s end, playing out as the flashback recounted by one policeman who spotted him sitting on the park’s swing set a few hours before he passed away. Slowly, the camera tracks to the side, gazing through a grid of climbing bars where frames within frames funnel down to the lonely figure sitting on the other end. Once again he croons ‘Gondola no Uta’ to himself, though this time with no accompaniment, and with far more contentment than his previous rendition. Watanabe is not letting the cancer take him, but rather chooses to go out on his own terms, and on the site of his enduring legacy no less.
As those mourning men at his funeral bring their contemplations to a close, many of them claim that they would have done the same in the same situation. As one of them suggests though, they could die at any time. A direct translation of Ikiru to English is ‘To Live’, and it is in formally binding Watanabe’s spiritual revitalisation so closely to this ideal that Kurosawa gracefully transforms his introspective study of mortality into a broader consideration of life’s subjective yet highly intrinsic purpose.
One of the strongest compositions of Kurosawa’s filmography, funnelling the shot through the play equipment down to Watanabe as he quietly sings ‘Gondola no Uta’.
Ikiru is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
