Rome Journal X: A Glass of Water

photograph of Roman glass of water by Hallie Cohen

Languages are literally interpretable, but in some ways they’re not. Certainly vernacular is a mountain to climb when it comes to communicating double entendres and subtleties of meaning. That's why, for instance, when a play is translated, say a play by Chekhov, there will be a literal rendering and then one by another playwright whose talents are conscripted for their understanding of the language of theater. True translation is a little like the kind of deencryption that Alan Turing practiced during the second world war. All this is said to point out that language is really a way of being. You can say “I want a glass of water” in English and it means the same as “voglio un bicchiere di acqua” in Italian, but there's an enormous difference between the subtext and history communicated by the English and Italian and there is a world of difference between asking for a glass of water in Milan, Bologna, Rome or Palermo. Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962) are both masterpieces of Italian cinema which describe migrations from south to north, from Sicily to Milan. But the real change relates to the unconscious neural substrates of language.  In this regard, the disintegration of the Parondi family in Rocco and His Brothers is a little like the fall of the Tower of Babel. Once held together by strong family ties, the brothers are now living in their separate worlds. Rome is not just a city, but a way of being that’s expressed by the way in which language is iterated and one of the best ways to really see Rome is to listen as you travel back and forth between antiquity and the present. And luxuriate in that “bicchiere di aqua” you ask for in Rome. It’s going to not only sound but taste different from the one that will be brought to you when you get to Milan.

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), in revival at Film Forum through Thursday, is like one of those large intergenerational novels. The disquisition is even presented like a novel with sections devoted to the brothers of the title, Rocco (Alain Delon), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). They're the sons of Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou) who at one point in the film talks about reuniting them like the five fingers of a hand. The displacement and demoralization of a Sicilian family who migrate to Milan comprises the theme, but the narrative takes the form of a classic fight film, as two of the brothers Simone and Rocco become professional boxers. And their deadly battle over a prostitute named Nadia (Annie Girardot) creates the central melodramatic struggle. Yet while the counterpoint between the two characters is simple their relationship is not. As low as Simone sinks in his criminal behavior, which ultimately includes murder, Rocco never forgets his filial duty. Is he motivated by guilt? Or simply by the mysterious blood ties of the insular Southern Italian world from which he comes? Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962) negotiates a similar territory in terms of how it treats the cultural disparities between the South and the North (particularly with regard to deep-seeded familial bonds) and even has a character who has migrated to work in the automobile industry as Ciro does in Visconti’s film. However, Rocco and His Brothers is far more gritty and actually has the noir quality of black and white American fight films like Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), which used the ring as a metaphor both for aspiration and defeat. This almost documentary style of shooting which holds up in neorealist films like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) looks curiously dated and inert here. After all these years Rocco and His Brothers screens like a period piece that lacks the imperturbability of,  for instance, Visconti’s The Leopard  (l963). If you are a boxing fan you'll find the actual choreography of Alain Delon’s fight scenes to be not lacking in interest. Rocco bobs and weaves, ducks and slips; he has a defensive counterpunching style which is in direct contrast to his brother Simone who is a violent brawler, bully and coward and it mirrors both his contrastingly admirable mixture of vulnerability and guile. There are several spectacular scenes, in particular one between Simone and Nadia which has the quality of a Wagnerian Liebestod and a horrific rape that may give the infamous ll minute take in Gaspar Noe’s Irrerversible (2002) a run for the money. But the romanticism is so extreme in places that you might find yourself nervously giggling at interchanges which were plainly intended to exude high drama.