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.

I am Love

Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love is an essay on superficiality posing as profundity. The film begins in snow and ends with rain falling on statues. Using these images, Guadagnino introduces the classic elements of the pathetic fallacy, with nature mirroring the emotions of delusion and sorrow. Add to this the stylized title sequences draped in Art Deco fonts. Name your scandalous heroine Emma and cast the role with an actress who has made a reputation in high-art cinema, like the film based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Have her fall in love with a chef. Is it her love of his shrimp that is the turning point of the drama, or is it her lust for him that makes her eventually fall in love with the shrimp? Establish the aristocratic, novelistic Italian drama, which is immediately suggestive of truly great works of cinema like Visconti’s The Leopard, and then add lush lyric sequences (including, naturally, the friezes of auspicious edifices) that conjure the sweep of history in movies like De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Portray doting servants of the kind that appeared in the self-same Italian epics. Create leitmotifs like a cropped hairstyle shared by an adulterous mother and lesbian daughter to establish a relationship predicated on rebellion. And then, as the coup de grace, create the ultimate piece of melodrama in an adventitious and tragic accident that reveals the falsity of a world. In The Leopard, as a case in point, Visconti created a tragic figure defined by the complexity of the historical context in which he found himself—an aristocrat at the time of Garibaldi, facing the economic exigencies of an aggressive new mercantile order. Based on the novel by Lampedusa, The Leopard was a profound meditation on the passing of a way of life. Ironically, there are Tancredis in both movies, but the similarity is in name only.