In his 1950s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini captured his wife and muse in a light completely different from her glamorous Hollywood persona. Drawn, fretful, and confused, the Swedish star wanders through these films as if looking anxiously at the man behind the camera, begging for direction while the exploratory Rossellini sought emotional truth by dropping her into alien landscapes. It's a harrowing series of portrayals of unsettled female consciousness, and also a glimpse into a complex behind-the-scenes romance as revealing as the films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich some 20 years earlier. If not quite their "The Devil Is a Woman," the 1954 masterpiece "Voyage to Italy" is similarly awash in the…

84.

So close to being a masterpiece, full of surprises that leap out of lethargy like epiphany--a tourist's film, but a homesick one, out of place out of time, intimate and ever distant. The only serious caveat I have are the last five minutes; not that I object to the idea that the two could ever wind up together--in a way, their personalities exactly deserve each other, Bergman in constant misinterpretation of the dead, Sanders in constant misinterpretation of the living. No, their winding up together seems plausible on a schematic level, but schematic levels are often so shallow. The film got so close to true emotion, so close to transcending its largely formal pleasures, especially in that graveyard scene,…

This is a very strange one. I saw this in the cinema and very much expected to like it but didn't. I can admit to never having seen any of Rossellini's films with a slight amount of shame, as I've owned Rome, Open City for a while and been aware of it for much longer. The concept for Journey to Italy is certainly intriguing (it occurred to me while watching that it may be based on Joyce's The Dead; the story about the youth waiting outside the young woman's window, an unsatisfactory marriage, even the name Joyce is used); it's somewhere between a road movie, snapshot of Italian life neo-realism and some kind of non-specific Meryl Streep or Barbara Streisand…

84.

So close to being a masterpiece, full of surprises that leap out of lethargy like epiphany--a tourist's film, but a homesick one, out of place out of time, intimate and ever distant. The only serious caveat I have are the last five minutes; not that I object to the idea that the two could ever wind up together--in a way, their personalities exactly deserve each other, Bergman in constant misinterpretation of the dead, Sanders in constant misinterpretation of the living. No, their winding up together seems plausible on a schematic level, but schematic levels are often so shallow. The film got so close to true emotion, so close to transcending its largely formal pleasures, especially in that graveyard scene,…

In his 1950s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini captured his wife and muse in a light completely different from her glamorous Hollywood persona. Drawn, fretful, and confused, the Swedish star wanders through these films as if looking anxiously at the man behind the camera, begging for direction while the exploratory Rossellini sought emotional truth by dropping her into alien landscapes. It's a harrowing series of portrayals of unsettled female consciousness, and also a glimpse into a complex behind-the-scenes romance as revealing as the films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich some 20 years earlier. If not quite their "The Devil Is a Woman," the 1954 masterpiece "Voyage to Italy" is similarly awash in the…

This is a very strange one. I saw this in the cinema and very much expected to like it but didn't. I can admit to never having seen any of Rossellini's films with a slight amount of shame, as I've owned Rome, Open City for a while and been aware of it for much longer. The concept for Journey to Italy is certainly intriguing (it occurred to me while watching that it may be based on Joyce's The Dead; the story about the youth waiting outside the young woman's window, an unsatisfactory marriage, even the name Joyce is used); it's somewhere between a road movie, snapshot of Italian life neo-realism and some kind of non-specific Meryl Streep or Barbara Streisand…