An English couple on the verge of divorce travel round the Naples area. Championed by 'Cahiers du Cinema' for its lucidity of expression, narrative simplicity, undemonstrative acting and evocation of emotions via location and environment, this is a quietly absorbing film and a key work of modern cinema.
Despite the relatively short running time (80 minutes) Rossellini’s film still manages a siesta-like pace, establishing almost disembodied strands of narrative while g... more >
Despite the relatively short running time (80 minutes) Rossellini’s film still manages a siesta-like pace, establishing almost disembodied strands of narrative while gradually distracting our gaze away from Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders and into the sensory world of the mediterranean: the camera lovingly capturing Vesuvius, the bay of Naples and the warm flow of the streets... It also visits the catacombs and the excavations at Pompeii where Bergman's character is both fascinated and disturbed by these tangible reminders of death.
Bergman and Sanders are a middle-aged English couple completely out of step with each other, now adrift in a foreign climate (Sanders especially so with his old fashioned values and cynical facade) as children and elements of catholicism gradually permeate the frame. The film portrays the futility of the couple’s bickering and seems to be saying that time will reduce us all to silence anyway – just like the marble sculptures of roman antiquity, the skulls within their catacombs and the man and woman preserved at Pompeii.
But Rossellini seems also to have wanted something approaching optimism, something reminding us to appreciate the little time we do have. Certainly Bergman and Sanders’ reconciliation is sudden and perhaps not overly convincing; and yet for a moment they are caught within the adoring fiesta crowd and glimpse its childlike simplicity – its celebration of the brief miracle that is life.
Journey to Italy is an intriguing, somewhat unclassifiable film deserving of its place in the bfi archive. The DVD liner notes and commentary by Laura Mulvey are illuminating too; particularly her assertion that the meandering narrative allows one to reflect on other things... Such things, perhaps, as the terribly precarious nature of our own existence?
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A rich, middle-aged English couple (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman) travels to Naples for a holiday and to dispose of some inherited property. The fact of being on ... more >
A rich, middle-aged English couple (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman) travels to Naples for a holiday and to dispose of some inherited property. The fact of being on holiday together and the experience of Naples affects them in different ways and provokes unease in their relationship. She visits the Archaeological Museum and the Catacombs, while he goes off to Capri and engages in an unsuccessful flirtation. A trip together to Pompeii, where archaeologists are in the process of uncovering the bodies of two lovers, brings the crisis in their marriage to a head, but the experience of watching an apparent miracle in a nearby town edges them uneasily together again.
Underlying this simple story is an element of psychodrama. Bergman at the time was married to director Roberto Rossellini and their marriage too was under strain. Rossellini’s camera spends a lot of time watching her face and gestures as she goes through the pain of understanding what was going wrong. But the film is also about Naples and the effect its history and sensual culture can have on people from emotionally and physically colder climes.
When it came out, Journey to Italy was a flop in Italy, but it was rapturously admired by the future directors of the French New Wave, notably Godard, Rohmer and Rivette. André Bazin saw it as the consummation of neo-realism - a film, he said, which gets you across the river by leaping over stepping stones provided by nature, rather than a bridge constructed by the film-maker.
The new DVD, with excellent visual quality and a sensitive commentary by Laura Mulvey, restores this seminal masterpiece to its deserved glory - and also gives it back its proper title of “Journey” rather than “Voyage” to a strange and wonderful Italy.
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The central journey of the story is that taken by Kathryn and Alex Joyce, a moneyed English couple, to Naples, there to sell the villa left them by Alex's uncle Homer.... more >
The central journey of the story is that taken by Kathryn and Alex Joyce, a moneyed English couple, to Naples, there to sell the villa left them by Alex's uncle Homer. They travel south in their Bentley. From the very first lines of the film – 'Where are we? Oh, I don’t know exactly', the early signs for their relationship are not promising and it is very soon made plain that not only is this the first time that they have been alone together since their marriage, but also that they have little in common and don’t even like each other much.
Although the beginning of the film is all movement, the couple are soon slowed in their journey, initially by cattle in the road and after their arrival by the circumstances of having to wait for a decision on the house. By the end of the film, they have been brought to a complete halt.
Their enforced inaction gives the film its subject and layers of interest. It maroons its leads in boredom, ennui, petty jealousy and irritation, driving them apart and into their own futile journeyings in the quest for a little meaning and warmth in their lives. The film meanders and detours and uses every opportunity to set the lassitude of Kathryn and Alex against the street life and sounds of Naples, its restaurants and its folk music. It is one of a number of contrasts at the heart of the film: northern against southern culture (with some nice digs at a certain type of English traveller along the way), Hollywood professionalism against reality of emotion and situation, and Rossellini used the actual uncertainty of his leads in filming to good effect. Certainly by the end their characters - Sanders' studious superiority and clipped address, Bergman's timidity, seem very fragile.
Throughout the film, the couple's sense of control and composure is jostled by the sounds, the people and the environment in which they find themselves, no more so than when at the very moment of their decision to divorce they are told that they must go to Pompeii, that minute, to see a wonderful discovery. They go and see a plaster-cast reconstitution of two voids beneath the ash, voids that turn out to be a man and a woman lying together in death. This really is too much for Kathryn and they leave, driving back to Naples, there to be slowed and finally stuck in their journey.
Their reconciliation comes after they have got out of the protective shell of their car and into the streets, but it’s an unlikely situation presented as being as frankly miraculous as the religious procession in which they are stuck. Uninterested in an extended appreciation of their renewed vows, the camera moves on to the people streaming by, finding interest and arbitrary subjects in the life of the streets, leaving Kathryn and Alex, Ingrid and George, cast adrift in the streets of Naples.
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