The Wonders

2014, Italy, directed by Alice Rohrwacher (aka Le meraviglie)

On the surface level a coming-of-age tale, and often a very affecting and unusual one, but deeper down a dissection of family -- both the ones allocated and chosen -- and, in the particular rural context, of the role of uncompensated labour within the family structure. The routines, often back-breaking, of children's work are depicted with great care, perhaps drawn from Rohrwacher'w own background, with the dividing line between domestic chores and work toward supporting the family income at best tenuous, particularly under the domination of a forbidding patriarch. The young actors, particularly Maria Alexandra Lungu as the oldest of the children, are excellent, while the particular non-touristy settings (in Tuscany and Lazio) peel back another layer of Italian life.

La più bella serata della mia vita

1972, Italy/France, directed by Ettore Scola

A genuinely strange film from Ettore Scola, an adaptation of a Friedrich Dürrenmatt novel in which Alberto Sordi stumbles into a mock trial conducted by a bunch of retired legal eagles in a sprawling castle. There's a sense of incipient madness almost all the time, an oddly hysterical atmosphere lurking just under the surface, both in the trial itself, which the "accused" and the members of the legal profession view very differently, and in Sordi's relationships with the castle staff, with miscommunication or non-communication the main feature. The main distraction, for me, was the post-dubbing of all the actors's voices, standard in Italy in the 1970s -- at times, the discrepancy between the studio-recorded dialogue and the setting, which would have had radically different acoustics, was jarring, and it's sad that there's no French-language audio in existence given that the legal minds are played by Charles Vanel, Claude Dauphin, Pierre Brasseur, and Michel Simon (in one of his final roles). 

The Desert of the Tartars

1976, Italy/France/Germany, directed by Valerio Zurlini

A viewing inspired by Judy Dean's excellent consideration of the film as part of David Cairns' 2014 Late Films Blogathon. It has mythical-colonials aspects that pair it very well with the near-contemporaneous Le Crabe-tambour, also featuring Jacques Perrin, though few films can compete with the astonishing locations of Zurlini's film. The picture is imbued with a profound sense of the absurd, with the protagonist discovering that his longer-for escape from the stifling life of the provincial nobility is, if anything, even more constricted with rules. It's also an exceptionally subtle work, with the days becoming months and perhaps even years through a very careful, discreet use of elision; the same discretion marks the film's attitude to death, generally turning away and allowing the characters to their own fates. The cast is quite remarkable, and Vittorio Gassman looks more than ever like something hewn from a Roman coin.

Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina

1972, Italy, directed by Marco Bellocchio (Slap the Monster on Page One)

A terrific portrait of media malfeasance, with grubby ties between newspaper editors and political barons exploited to the maximum to drive the news agenda -- whether it's the out and out fabrication of inflammatory material on political opponents or the canny manipulation of a handy murder case to distract readers from weightier national matters. Gian Maria Volonté is (predictably) wonderful as the most self-serving of the newspapermen, smoothly crafting alternative realities (there's an amusing scene when he has to trash a headline as things don't quite work as he had planned).

For the first hour or so, Bellocchio generally allows the viewer to connect the dots without much assistance, before becoming a little more obvious near the conclusion -- it's a shame, because the film doesn't seem to need the dose of pedagogical assistance, particularly given that one of the film's themes is the idea of a media that might treat viewers and readers as adults. The critique of the giallo genre is equally pointed without getting the same over-emphatic treatment: Bellocchio leaves the viewer in no doubt that the giallo's tendency to exploit (female) suffering for entertainment, without paying much attention to the ugly, messy brutality of violence, does its own disservice to the mass media.

L'Amico di famiglia

2006, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (The Family Friend)

I'm starting to sense a theme in Paolo Sorrentino's films -- the first three films I've seen are all portraits of isolated or solitary men, twisted by circumstance and unable to pursue conventional lives and friendships. Women are certainly present in these tales, but almost always on the periphery: even where, as here, they take an active role in shaping the action, it's mostly as seen from the male perspective, with Sorrentino taking a greater interest in the consequences for his central characters (The Consequences of Love...). As stylishly constructed as Sorrentino's other films, L'Amico di famiglia is also somewhat more insistently oddball, from the opening shot (though that is, eventually, explained in fairly logical terms). That may reflect the worldview of the titular friend, Geremia De Geremei, played by Giacomo Rizzo -- a sort of Italian Ron Perlman -- in a performance that's devoid of vanity; Geremia, a moneylender, an unattractive man, both mentally and physically, and Rizzo never looks for the audience's sympathy, with every minor shot at redemption quickly turned around by a man constitutionally unable to avoid the temptation to take
his pound of flesh.

Le Conseguenze dell'amore

2004, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (aka The Consequences of Love)

Paolo Sorrentino's films, like those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, make a fine argument for returning to similar themes and styles if there's more to be mined from those ideas -- Il Divo shares a lead actor, a bravura style, and a tone with Sorrentino's earlier feature, for instance, but there's no sense of a director simply spinning his wheels. Sorrentino is even able to reproduce a similar scene without it seeming stale: here, a particularly serious moment is accompanied by a rendition of the Ornella Vanoni pop song Rossetto e cioccolato, just as Il Divo features a wonderful sequence intercutting the lead character with a performance of a soaring Renato opus. Perhaps it's a personal sensitivity, but the rhythms of his scenes, where a great deal of the communication and effect are wordless, seems to work especially well for me -- there's a hypnotic quality to his camera movements, prowling corridors over and over (à la Marienbad, with similar dreamlike effect) or unexpectedly rising over the crown of a character's head, revisiting and insistently reworking the same perspectives to give us a sense of a most unusual, cloistered life.

Il Divo

2008, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino

In the second half of Paolo Sorrentino's enthralling portrait of Giulio Andreotti, there's a scene where the politician sits quietly with his wife and watches a Renato Zero concert on television. Zero sings a soaring version of I Migliori Anni Della Nostra Vita, a choice of title that's of course entirely apposite to the film's portrayal of Andreotti as a man who reaches the political pinnacle while barely ever appearing to enjoy a single moment of his profess life (making him the most un-Italian of his countrymen). It's a bravura sequence, carefully splicing images of Zero on stage with the unspoken understanding between Andreotti and his wife, and cutting with a sudden silence to the next scene -- a fine example of Sorrentino's confident showmanship and also of how that showmanship is always in the service of his story. Not incidentally, it also showcases his instinct for music, whether Italian or English-language pop, classical, or original soundtrack (the intoxicating marriage of music to image reminds me Olivier Assayas's films). Sorrentino doesn't lay claim to definitive truth here -- any account of Andreotti's professional life is filled with silence and shadow -- but the cumulative picture of Italy's rotten political scene is quite devastating.

Il Sorpasso

1962, Italy, directed by Dino Risi

Through the luck of the draw, I've come across a handful of films with stings in the tail of late, but nothing tops the finale here -- an utterly jarring conclusion to a generally breezy film, filled with throwaway Italian pop music of the era. The film opens on a note that recalls Nanni Moretti's wonderful 1994 Caro diario, in which Moretti drives the empty Roman streets during the height of the summer, before the film develops into a picaresque account of the open road, replete with enjoyable minor characters and a constant onward momentum -- the next town, the next adventure, the next corner -- that's fundamental to the character played by Vittorio Gassman. He's a man whose apparently joyful view of life gradually reveals itself to be a cover for his fundamental inability to follow through on anything serious or worthwhile; there's fear rather than delight at the heart of the character. That said, the film's way of resolving this problem is, to say the least, a slap in the face; if the analogy is to Italy of the post-war era, the film takes a dim view indeed of the state of the country circa 1962. Gassman is terrific -- finding the tenderness in a character who might otherwise just have been boorish, while Jean-Louis Trintignant is an enjoyable foil, gradually, if very tentatively, loosening his self-imposed restrictions in the company of a man incapable of taking no for an answer.

Good Morning, Night

2003, Italy, directed by Marco Bellocchio (original title: Buongiorno, notte)

Bellocchio's film re-imagines the Aldo Moro kidnapping as a virtual chamberpiece, with very occasional sorties into the outside world, taking us into the Rome apartment where the Red Brigades held Moro for nearly two months in 1978. The film focuses on Chiara (Maya Sensa), the only woman in the apartment, who has no direct contact with Moro but who ultimately finds that the old man is invading her dreams. Bellocchio uses Chiara to explore the tensions that strain relations between the four kidnappers - part of a larger, unseen network - as the episode drags on and they are unable to open negotiations with those in power.

The film never really explores Chiara's reasons for choosing a life with the Red Brigades, though Bellocchio draws connections between religious and political fervour - both the terrorists and the priests utter repeated incantations at one point or another, and indeed the terrorists aren't immune to the usual rituals of Italian life, as in the striking moment where they bless themselves before breaking bread on the film's final evening. The singing that pierces the soundtrack at moments of great tension also seems as much religious as secular. Still, Sensa's performance captures in minute detail the growing cracks in her political faith, in the ethos that asks her to value an ideology more than the man sequestered in a cell behind the bookcase.

Mid-August Lunch

2008, Italy, directed by Gianni Di Gregorio (original title: Pranzo di ferragosto)

Most of the reviews I've seen for Gianni De Gregorio's film use the word "slight" or some variation, which as far as I can tell is another way for the writers to express the idea that the film is light on plot. That's true - the film is about a few days in the life of a middle-aged slacker, played by the director, while he looks after his mother and several other older women - but the implication that the film itself is thus somehow lacking in substance is entirely misplaced. De Gregorio was one of the many writers credited on Matteo Garrone's film Gomorra, and there's a surprising continuity between the two films - an opening that takes one to the heart of the matter with virtually no context for instance, but particularly the rich series of character portraits, each carefully delineated so that we're able to follow the dynamic that develops between the unlikely group. Equally, there's a profound sense of place, of the details of Rome's August rhythms far from the tourist trail, with De Gregorio indulging his love for the city in the wonderful moped sequence that simultaneously pays homage to Nanni Moretti's very different celebration of Rome in 1994's Caro Diario.  In its quiet way, the film also eviscerates the lip-service paid to the cult of the "mama", revealing the reality for all too many older women without ever allowing the tone of the film to become embittered. Terrific performances all around, too, dignified and honest.

Big Deal on Madonna Street

1958, Italy, directed by Mario Monicelli (original title I soliti ignoti)


Although it has an exceptional cast - Gassman! Mastroianni! Cardinale! - perhaps the producers weren't confident that their largely nascent stars had what it took to make the film a success, since the early posters for the film featured Totò misleadingly front and center. The older comic's role is rather small but Monicelli introduces him in clever fashion, hiding him in the centre of a scene and then gradually revealing him such that you suddenly realize he's been there all along, cloaked in darkness.

Perhaps Monicelli's greatest trick here is to combine a treasurable series of character portraits with the relentlessly downward spiral of his narrative, in which a grandiose robbery is transformed into farce; everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and a little more to boot. Those broad-brush portraits employ and dissect more or less every Italian stereotype - snobby northerners, cunning Neapolitans, pathologically jealous Sicilians - around, suggesting that somehow that a rather motley collection of individuals is capable of collaborating in some loose collective endeavour, albeit with plenty of mistakes along the way. It's not hard to discern therein that a commentary on the state of recovering post-war Italy, or rather an undercutting of the public success story with a counter-narrative of muddling through; that commentary is worn lightly, though, in a film that so adeptly creates an atmosphere of impending comic disaster.

Siamo Uomini O Caporali

1953, Italy, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque

My sister-in-law is from a small town near Naples, and when we travelled to the wedding I thought some research on that most iconic of Neapolitan film performers, Totò, was in order. I dragged my indulgent wife around an absurd number of shops in search of Totò DVDs only to find that very few of his films have English subtitles; I couldn't find any subtitled fare from before the early 1950s, and the few films I did find seemed, for the most part, like second-string affairs.

Siamo uomini o caporali ("Are We Men or Corporals?") was written by Totò, too, under his real name or an abbreviation thereof since he had noble origins, with the multiple names such afflictions entail. It's a sort of loose sketch film, framed by an extended interview in a doctor's office in which Totò, very much in Little Tramp-ish mode, expounds on his philosophy that men can be divided into two groups, the eponymous men and corporals, before narrating several instances in which he came into contact with such corporals.

The first section deals with Totò's wartime adventures in a German-run camp, and it's not hard to discern a somewhat queasy foreshadowing of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, with Totò's camp experience the background for a burgeoning romance, and a spoof of Nazi medical experimentation that seems distinctly unamusing. The subsequent sequences, particularly those which undermine the image of a beneficent American military, are stronger, although the overdubbing of the "American" characters, a standard Italian practice of the period, is distractingly poor.

Although director Camillo Mastrocinque worked frequently with Totò, he doesn't always seem to appreciate what he has on his hands: one of Totò's great strengths is his way with words, and he delivers a terrific near-soliloquy early on in the doctor's office, but Mastrocinque constantly undermines the performance by cutting away for reaction shots. Later, he has the good sense the to keep the camera squarely on his star even when engaged in conversation with another actor, for it's Totò's actions and reactions that make the scene.

I Am Love

2010, Italy, directed by Luda Guadagnino (Original title: Io sono l'amore)

Luca Guadagnino's film is an adept and enthralling latter-day re-working of some of the melodramatic territory of both Sirk and Hitchcock, but without the literal-mindedness of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a compelling film that nonetheless remained tied rather too closely to its inspiration, unable to imagine the same emotional territory in a different setting.

Hitchcock's influence is most obvious in Guadagnino's use of music, heightening already tense scenes, or adding danger where none initially seems present - and pushing right to the limits of the absurd, such as in a sequence where Tilda Swinton, the film's central character, accidentally runs into a chef friend of her son's. His profession is central to the film's theme of food as a method of communication and as a store of memories; a particular soup recipe, borne from Russia to Italy, is at the heart of the narrative, precipitating the film's most shocking, change of tone (which recalls a similar moment in another Italian film, The Best of Youth).

There's an extraordinary sensuousness to the film, where everything is heightened, whether it's the intensity - almost frenzied - of the music, the close-ups of glistening food, the quick rhythm of a dash through a town, or the abstract, sun-dappled body parts on a lazy summer afternoon (Guadagnino slows the film right down for this sequence, as if to emphasize each blade of grass, each breath, recalling the languid pace of Apichatpong Weerasethakul).

Gomorra

2009, Italy, directed by Matteo Garrone

Despite the rather different subject matter - the influence of the Camorra on life in the region around Naples, versus the state of the French education system - my first reaction to Gomorra reminded me of how I felt after watching Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs. Both films work hard to present an apparently "realistic" view of their chosen subjects, through a series of interlinked anecdotes, and both raise a degree - even a strong degree - of concern in the viewer about the situations depicted onscreen. The question that lingered for me, however, was what to do with this sense of outrage, that things are broken and need to be fixed. That's perhaps a question more important for people closer to the ground; perhaps notably, when I visited Naples this year there were DVD copies of the film everywhere, including in the sheaves of pirated disks outside the central rail station.

The broader social questions aside, I found the film to be an impressive piece of work, which plunges the viewer into the world of the Camorra with no preliminaries - the relationships between the characters are barely explained, and we often don't even get the characters' names. The action changes from one aspect of the Camorra's operations to another - the blooding of new recruits, or the operation of business fronts - with no more warning, almost mid-scene on occasion. Garrone's concern is less to resolve individual plotlines, although some segments are brought to a conclusion, than to create a sense of the Camorra's pervasive impact on life in the region. There's nothing hidden about most of their work - unlike many films devoted to the underworld, Garrone shoots the vast majority of the film in broad daylight, with all of the thuggery visible in the harsh light of southern Italy.

I Fidanzati

1963, Italy, directed by Ermanno Olmi

Like Olmi's previous film, Il Posto, I Fidanzati has the slightest of premises - here, the departure of a young Milanese man for a new job in Sicily, and the impact of the distance on his relationship with his fiancée - that functions as a starting point for a series of explorations of different forms of understanding and communication. Just as the young man's lonely existence prompts him to re-evaluate what he has left behind, and what that might imply for his future, he is also forced to confront and attempt to understand a culture that is in many ways as alien as that of a foreign country, even a century after Italian unification. Even as he narrates this encounter, though, Olmi also underlines the homogeneity of other modern institutions, with the protagonist living much of his life in a series of blandly functional buildings, which could be anywhere in the country (both films depict eating in a strikingly unromantic way, given the normal presentation of food in films from and about Italy).

Although the main characters aren't always thoroughly developed - at times, they recall the flat non-characters of a film like L'Année dernière à Marienbad - Olmi's eye for the details of human behaviour serves him well, and the sketches of minor characters are engaging and often witty, while he finds a strange and compelling beauty in some of the industrial settings of the film, whether captured in a fluid tracking shot near the beginning, or in a long shot of a building cascading with showers of welding sparks.

Il Posto

1961, Italy, directed by Ermanno Olmi
A member of the second generation of post-war Italian filmmakers, director Ermanno Olmi combines much of the spirit of neo-realism with an extremely dry wit, using his acute observational skills to skewer the absurdities of the modern workplace. Olmi's film has the thinnest of narrative threads - a fresh-faced young man applies for a job, and meets a girl - but plot is the least of his concerns, as he develops a rich and wry portrait of a large Italian company, where dozens of young people compete for slots that will provide them a job for life (given how young some of them are, that's a very long time indeed; while some viewers may be nostalgic for the notion of job security, Olmi tends to see many such positions as long-lasting dead ends).

The company bombards the potential new hires with a barrage of tests and exercises worthy of NASA, with the young applicants themselves often mystified as to the utility of what is asked of them. Once hired, though, the employees tended to be regarded as recalcitrant pupils in the classroom, with many of the workers conforming to this treatment, including acting up at the back of the room (the contrast between the status of applicants and employees is underlined by two sequences focused on late arrivals: the employee receives a paternalistic dressing-down where the applicant is indulged). Olmi draws a clear contrast between the conformity idealized by the company and the individual lives of the employees, inter-cutting, in an entirely unexpected fashion, brief and powerful snapshots from the home lines of those we encounter, while his efficient establishment of character, and character foibles, at times hints at Tati's brilliant cinematic shorthand.

Bicycle Thieves

1948, Italy, directed by Vittorio De Sica (original title: Ladri di biciclette)
Probably the best known of all Italian neo-realist films, Bicycle Thieves (which was inexplicably translated as Bicycle Thief in the US for many years, undercutting one of the film's key points) has the simplicity of a myth: a man who requires a bicycle for his work has that bicycle stolen from him, leading to a downward spiral as he attempts to recover his stolen property. As Michelangelo Antonioni would later say, the man's importance resides exclusively in the fact that his bicycle has been stolen - there's no sustained attempt to explore his state of mind - but that simple fact is of enormous import in a society trying to recover from the wartime period, and scarred by terrible unemployment.

Simply getting the simplest of jobs in post-war Italy seems a tremendous achievement, one that brings with it the sense of restored personal dignity, and it's this which makes the otherwise unremarkable theft seem so overwhelming. The man and his family have had to sacrifice almost everything to get to that point, including their bedsheets - in a mesmerizing sequence set in a vast pawnbroker's enterprise - and the almost immediate disruption of the man's tentative dreams leads him to acts of increasing desperation, the loss of the very dignity so recently restored. The institutions of Italian life, seen here particularly in the form of the church and the police, do nothing to assist this man in his quest, and indeed sometimes seem actively to place further barriers in his way, concerned ultimately with their own well-being rather than that of individual members of society.

Beyond the focus on one individual struggle, the film is also a richly detailed portrait of Roman streets in the mid-1940's, with De Sica's camera taking in rowdy street scenes in popular neighborhoods, markets that look more third world than first, and the realities of the cheaply-built apartments that infested the suburbs just after the war (locations that would prove fertile for other filmmakers too). There's nothing of the hand-held style that functions as a marker for "realism" in more recent work, though: De Sica is a skilled professional, making artful use of fluid tracking shots and lighting in keeping with his professional origins in the studio system, however different and striking his subject matter.

Germania anno zero

1948, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (Germany Year Zero)
Germania anno zero is the most pared-down and also the most unrelenting of Rossellini's (post-) wartime trilogy, set, unlike the previous films, in Berlin and filmed two summers after the end of the war, with the city clearly still in the most abject of states. The film opens with a title that indicates that it purports to be an "objective and true portrait of Berlin", reminiscent of the documentary trappings that frame the six vignettes in Paisà, although this film, unlike its immediate predecessor, does not have a specific documentary basis.

However, what it shares with Paisà is the sense - amplified here - that the end of the war does not, in and of itself, bring true liberation: for many people, it's simply the beginning of a new, and often equally devastating phase (it's also an act of great daring to invite us to sympathize with the ordinary citizens of a country so recently vilified and defeated, although the ending might be read as a comment on the need for a kind of purge before the page can be turned).

The physical and economic destruction that we see from the film's opening scenes is paralleled by the moral collapse that has infected many people, children most of all; younger characters have peripheral, if sometimes significant, roles in the two previous films in the trilogy, whereas here they are the central focus, with the film following young Edmund as he attempts to make some contribution to his family's well-being. His downward spiral is perhaps best encapsulated by the two tracking shots that follow his progress near the beginning and end of the film: the first sees him confidently stride through the city, whereas later, the weight of experience has become crushing, and the streets themselves seem oppressive (his claustrophobic home is hardly better, with Rossellini crowding the shots to emphasize the press of humanity).

The war and its aftermath have created opportunities for predators more than for honest people, with usurers and thieves abounding. As in Roma, citta apertà there's also something sexually predatory about the ex-Nazi teacher that Edmund encounters; Rossellini isn't capable of limiting his corruption to the economic and political levels. It's a persistent cliché that weakens the film somewhat. There are moments, too, drawn from the purest melodrama rather than the well of neo-realism, perhaps most especially a sequence involving a glass filled with poison, but the film as a whole has an air of authentic despair that's on occasion quite devastating.

Paisan

1946, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (original title: Paisà)

Made almost immediately after Rome, Open City, Paisà abandons that film's generally conventional structure in favour of a series of almost completely unconnected vignettes that are linked only in that they chronicle the progress of the American army up the length of Italy during 1943-44. The episodes are strikingly different in nature, though they tend toward the downbeat (a notable contrast to the usual depiction of literal and figurative liberation), and collectively paint a tough-minded portrait of the aftermath of war, which brings with it new conflicts and challenges.

Rossellini's main interest here is the meeting between two apparently alien cultures, those of wartime (and often backward and impoverished) Italy and the American military machine as it rolls up the peninsula, providential supplies in tow. It's not always a happy meeting, beginning with mistrust in Sicily, whose residents greet the Americans, and the collapse of Mussolini's regime, with some ambivalence (the complexities of Sicilian post-war loyalties are explored in greater detail in Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano). Even in areas where the Americans are actively greeted as liberators - with the film incorporating, almost seamlessly, documentary footage - the local population has difficulty relating to its military saviours, such is the economic gulf that separates them, with the US military seen by many hungry Italians, including children, as a soft target for theft. As the film progresses, however, the restoration and resumption of humanity creates a powerful bond between the two cultures, with a paradoxical optimism emerging from what is often a despairing catalogue of individual incidents. The final sequence, in particular, speaks eloquently of the power of individuals to seek to understand another culture - a theme explored by many of the filmmakers from Africa who cite the Italian neo-realists as an important influence.

Although many of the smaller parts are played by non-professionals, with various sequences filmed on the streets of Rome and other Italian cities (one part of Italy often masquerades for another: the Sicilian sequences were filmed in Amalfi, though the devastation of Naples, in the second episode, is absolutely authentic), Rossellini artfully blends in professional actors, with almost all of the American roles played by experienced theatre hands (some of whom, like William Tubbs, had interesting post-war film careers) to anchor each episode.

Roma, città aperta

1945, Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City)
Heralded as the beginning of the neo-realist movement, Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta doesn't conform to some of the key expectations that would come to be associated with later films, most notably in its reliance on professional actors as well as many of the conventions of melodrama, while much of the film is shot on studio sets, however makeshift the studio may have been in the Rome of early 1945. The circumstances of the film's shooting weren't quite as hand-to-mouth as later legend would have it, particularly with regard to the film stock (there were just three kinds of stock, and they were consistently used for interiors or exteriors, as documented, among other places, in David Forgacs's study of the film), while Rossellini was an experienced professional with several fascist-era features under his belt, something that was less than politically expedient (for him and for many critics) in the immediate aftermath of the war.

What is remarkable about the film, even now, though, is the simple fact that it was made literally within months of the kinds of events it depicts (some anchored firmly in actual incidents, an idea that Rossellini further developed in his next film, Paisà), and under extraordinarily disrupted circumstances; it's both an accomplished, sometimes manipulative bit of filmmaking and one that literally reeks of its time and place (the choppy film processing contributes greatly to the sense of a film made on the fly and in locations similar to those being depicted onscreen). The documentary air of those street-level scenes are married with passages that evoke the more regular production of the Italian (and American) studios of the time, with comic local colour bits that make great use of the talents of performers like Aldo Fabrizi (as a priest involved with the resistance), though the comedy turns sour very quickly and definitively during a search that rousts several resistants.

Rossellini's portrait of the Nazis owes much to what were already quite conventional representations: while the Italian fascist officials (petty and otherwise) are often bumbling and warm-hearted, the German characters are coldly efficient, capable of drinking and amusing themselves mere feet from a chillingly-depicted torture chamber (the Gestapo chief and his female colleague are a sadistic and callous homosexual/lesbian pair, hardly the stuff of realistic portrayals).

Throughout the film, children listen in to adult conversations and observe adult situations, growing up quickly (they both play at and live through the war), learning brutal lessons that, at the conclusion of the film, are nonetheless leavened with a certain degree of hope, a hope partly created by the audience's awareness of the subsequent course of events; it's a theme that recurs throughout Rossellini's next two films, though in more challenging terms.