Bellissima (2018)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

Admirable film.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This is the 3rd Luchino Visconti film that I've watched, the other two being 'Ossessione' and 'La Terra Trema'. What's interesting about these 3 films is that although all of them contain the quintessential neo-realist backdrop of post war Italian helplessness and melancholy, each of them have a distinct and separate tone to them. 'Ossessione' was an erotic thriller and 'La Terra Trema' was a socially conscious family drama. 'Bellissima' on the other hand has a much more lighthearted comedic tone. The central element of a mother desperately wanting her daughter to win a talent contest serves the same thematic purpose as the actual bicycle in De Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves'. It represents something deeper about the mother and also the post war Italian working class in general. The film also features a really confident, assertive and dynamic performance by the great Anna Magnani. She drives the film forward through sheer personality. However having said all that, I don't think 'Bellissima' comes anywhere close to reaching the heights of 'Ossessione' and 'La Terra Trema' which I think are masterpieces. It's worth a watch, but I don't think it is a film to desperately seek out.

This is a very small story--a poor woman tries to make her daughter a child movie star--but it has a tremendous, operatic performance from Anna Magnani. Magnani is like all other stage mothers in that the success she desires for the child is really her frustrated ambition for herself (her tiny daughter has no interest in acting, and whines and cries all through the picture), but unlike them in that she never loses her sense of humour. When she realises she has been cheated, instead of becoming outraged, she laughs at her own foolishness, briefly relaxing from her usual blind intensity to become a normal, likable woman.Her character's desperation to escape her life is understandable when one sees the dump she lives in with her husband and child. The small, dilapidated flat with stained walls, in a building full of fat, sour- faced harpies in hideous housedresses--one never sees such horrors in Hollywood films. Too bad this neo-realism became old-style realism--we could use some of this today as a counter to the candy-floss world we see on TV and in the movies.One amusing note: The film-struck Magnani says at one point to her husband, "Oh, Burt LanCASter! Molto gentile!" Three years later Lancaster would be playing her lover in The Rose Tattoo.

***Spoiler alert*** Anna Magnani is a force of nature in this movie. As Maddalena, she laughs, she cries, and kisses 50,000 lire goodbye, all in an attempt to make a better life for her young daughter. She thinks that future is in the movies, and Maddalena is the ultimate stage mother. La Magnani dominates any and every scene she's in. One remarkable scene is when she pushes her way into the screening of her daughter's screen test: she recognizes an assistant who had acted in a film called "Under the sun of Rome" (Sotto il sole di Roma). This is an actual film, and as I had just seen it last week (it's the season of Neorealism for me), I recognized that the actress was indeed the female lead in that earlier film. The assistant describes how she's dropped out of acting because no director has hired her lately, which starts to undermine Magnani's dream for her daughter. A remarkable bit of verisimilitude, and causes all kinds of alienation effects. Great film, great performances, including the actor who played Maddalena's husband (in another brilliant touch, named "Spartaco"!)

Anna Magnani is magnificent as a pushy show-biz mother determined to get her daughter into the movies. She's like an early prototype of Bette Midler but she's more down-to-earth and with a greater propensity for feeling. (Midler could do the comedy but not the pathos). The film is charming but for a Visconti movie, it's slight. It's a great director's trifle about the movies; he enjoys poking fun at the stereotypes he's worked with in more serious films. It's laugh out loud funny.The film doesn't offer any insights into the movie-making process and even the wheeling and dealing seems perfunctory. At times you wish maybe Visconti had gone a little deeper. (At the end he makes a point that the movies can be shallow but we know that already). Take Magnani out of the equation and there really isn't much left. She's the life-force that holds it together. It really is a great piece of acting.