Cinema
Domenico
By ISABEL QUIGLY
H Posto and Innocent Sor- o cerers. (Curzon.)—One, Two, • Three. (Odeon, Marble 0 • Arch.) o E IN Italy cheerfulness is not • considered, as it is among us, 3 a cardinal virtue and an in- dispensable oiler of the social wheels. When you get away from the sort of • Latin exuberance rather easily mistaken for it, things can become irreparably grey. The three saddest Italian exports lately have been set in Milan, where life looked catastrophically, operat- ically dreadful to Visconti in Rocco, blankly and stylishly awful to Antonioni in La Notte, and now soulless and appalling on a small, gentle scale to Ermanno ami in II Posto.
Olmi is a seasoned documentary maker and 11 Posto is so entirely without frills that at first it seems almost without style; then you realise its style is not so much non-existent as trans- parent, completely functional, a glass to see straight through, not a looking-glass for the director's temperament. Its main image is the human face, its preoccupation, in a beautifully discreet and sidelong way, the human heart. It has a 'Cr certificate and shows the amount of external life that any child could watch; but it shows enough tragic implications to wring any adult withers. It has no immediate villains on whom to pin the guilt for the awfulness of things —even society is only very indirectly indicted— only a bleakness that seems to have settled over everyone, including the 'good' people (com- pare the old man's selfishness in Umberto D, so much like the selfishness of society, when con- fronted with other people's troubles).
The film is set in one of the huge firms in Milan, where a boy just out of his village school comes to find a job. Domenico is taken on as an office boy, with a promise that when there is a space free for him he will become a clerk; and after a while he does become a clerk, gets his desk and lamp, moves his rubber and his pot of glue along and is all set, at sixteen, to spend the rest of his days there. Domenico isn't the office boy most likely to succeed: he is slowish, accommodating, shy. You know he will never get out of that desk : you see the elderly clerks, lifelong Domenicos.
Olmi is compassionate, in the framework of what is often pure and perfect comedy. He watches cruelty, but never cruelly. At the office party, for instance, in about two minutes we see a whole family tragedy—husband, wife, flirta- tion, humiliation, misunderstanding—and his pity is always present, quiet, never hysterical, scarcely commenting. But the bleakness he shows is everywhere : in the completely undem- onstrative, unloving home life of Domenico's family, kind plump mum and amiable dad appar- ently unable to commugjeate kindness and ami- ability around them, the two brothers quarrelling, and the secretiveness and incommunicability that so often goes with overcrowding. There is a girl, too, very pretty and just that little bit offhand and insensitive, in a way that would most appeal to and flutter an innocent like Domenico. This, and much more about comedy and hope- lessness, is conveyed by the boy, Sandro Panzieri, whose face seems to do everything, or perhaps simply has everything done with it. Between him and Olmi we have a heartrending tragi-comic comment on many things from adolescence to industrialisation, made with wonderful deftness, lightness and seriousness.
With it is Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers ('A' certificate), a mistitled film about the hip- sterised younger generation of Warsaw by the man who brought wartime and immediately post-war Poland alive for so many of us. I cared for neither the young doctor nor the bright young thing enough to mind whether or not they went to bed in the end separately or together, and the whole thing seemed unneces- sarily long drawn out. But there are fascinating glimpses of life behind the Curtain at an ex traordinary level of je m'en fiche and the things that go with it—gin and jazz on a tape-recorder worked with your toes, etc.
Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. ('A' certificate) is remarkable for its speed and for James Cagney letting rip as he must always have wanted to, but for little else. Cagney in West Berlin selling coca-cola to the Russians gets landed with coca-cola tycoon's daughter, a southern belle dressed and combed to look like Mrs. Kennedy, who marries a card-carrying commie called Otto Piffle from East Berlin, and has to face the tycoon with a fait accompli. A Pocketful of Miracles situation follows, in which the wild man is groomed for his in-laws during twenty exhausting minutes and gets the plum coca-cola job on earth. Cynical, mechan-' ical, in the end almost totally unfunny.
Previous page
