The second film in our journey through the Roberto Rossellini Directs Ingrid Bergman boxset doesn't lead either our agnostic or Christian host to denounce the story's conversion narrative like last week's film. Instead, Europe '51 is a tale of a bourgeois woman reacting to tragedy by embracing social solidarity in a pre-Liberation Theology Catholicism, so a St. Francis-like faith that still thinks it needs to be a 3rd way separate from actual socialism. Like Dostoevsky's The Idiot this is a tale of living by the earliest tenets of Christianity in the modern world, and how the modern world will still kill you for it, at least figuratively.
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Spine 673: Stromboli
This week we start 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, a boxset containing three of the five films Rossellini and Bergman made together over the course of their 7 year relationship. We've already seen enough variety from Rossellini, chronologically before and after this set in his career - The War Trilogy, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, The Flowers of St. Francis, Il Generale Della Rovere - that we shouldn't be surprised that Stromboli doesn't fit neatly into Italian Neorealism, but still it takes a bit for us to settle into and understand Rossellini's more spiritual approach to filmmaking in this set. While we'll take a minute to accustom ourselves to the spirituality guiding the film, the spirituality of the main character is one we will continue to take issue with. This is definitely the most cynical we've ever been about a film with religious themes.
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Spine 671: La Cage aux Folles
Sometimes Criterion shows us a single film from a director we'd never seen before and leaves us wanting for the rest of our project, so often actually that we call them "one and dones". But then sometimes Criterion shows us a movie by Edouard Molinaro and it's fine that they aren't going to show us another. La Cage aux Folles (1978) is a funny movie, and is also a film that wants to show a very normal family that happens to be LGBTQ. It even may succeed, despite the fact that nearly everyone involved in writing, directing, and performing seems to be a straight guy who holds the material in some amount of disdain, though a disdain that doesn't necessarily shine through in performance. There is heart here, despite everything, but it's mostly a "both sides" farce. Still Criterion takes the opportunity to include an interview with Laurence Senelick, author of The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, who gives a very interesting history of drag and gender-nonconformity that helps contextualize La Cage in its time, even if it doesn't quell our troubles with the film's politics.
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Spine 670: To Be or Not to Be
A problem talking about the films of Ernst Lubitsch is that it's very hard not to just start listing the good gags, and To Be or Not to Be (1942) is full of great gags. It's also full of suspense - a film that seamlessly balances noir-ish intrigue with farce. Fascism deserves to be mocked. Fascism is a performance, and can be undermined with performance. To wring our hands over jokes about Hitler, or any other fascist past or present, is to suggest fascist figures are somehow sacrosanct. They aren't. They never will be. Become the frog that plagues Pharaoh, make der Fuehrer into a clown, reject their authority and reject the fear they want to use against you. And where whatever mask you need to to do so.
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Spine 669: Charulata
Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is a masterpiece. We haven't seen a film that so exquisitely captures longing since Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) 500 Spines ago. In ten more years I suspect I will still be thinking about the visuals of Charulata - the swing, the bedroom window, that final pair of freeze frames - as much as I still think about, say, the camera following the cigarette in In the Mood. Absolute perfection.
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
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