"Roma, cittą aperta," filmed as the Nazis were retreating from Rome and released as "The Open City," was the first part of Roberto Rossellini's ending-of-World War II trilogy. Released in 1946, it was an international sensation. If Rossellini did not invent Italian neo-realism with that legendary film,* he was the first Italian director noticed in the English-speaking world. "Paisą," the second film of the trilogy, is episodic, like "The Open City," with segments from six Italian locales, moving north with the Allied invaders/liberators from their landing in Sicily in 1943 to a desperate battle in the reeds along the Po River in 1944.

Although following the trajectory of pushing the Nazis northward (complete with a map showing what areas Allied troops commanded at the time of each segment), the primary theme seems to be cross-cultural misunderstanding between the Italians and the Americans whom the Italians are shown as welcoming (after some initial suspiciousness on the part of Sicilian peasants) and as fervently aiding in fighting the Nazis. Except in the middle episode in Florence, a naive viewer would never guess that Italy had been allied with Nazi Germany. (For that matter, Rossellini's first films were propaganda for the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, though a communist partisan is the hero of "The Open City.")

The Italians as Rossellini presented them are freedom fighters for whom the Germans are more alien even than an African American military policeman (in the Neapolitan episode). The Americans mostly fail to understand the Italians. In the first episode, a platoon assumes that the Sicilian girl who has guided them has betrayed them, when in fact she shot a German, not the American soldier left to guard her.

The drunken black soldier does not seem to realize he is watching a puppet show. After being thrown out of the puppet theater, he sings "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" and tells the young ragazzo that he does not want to go back to the poverty of the rural American South. The boy does not understand what the soldier says, and the soldier does not understand the boy's warning not to go to sleep in the rubble, because if he does his boots will be stolen (along with his harmonica). Finding the young thief again, the soldier demands that the boy take him to where he lives. It is not clear whether he understands that both the boys' parents are dead, but the reality of the desperate people who have taken refuge in a cave dawns on him, and he forgives the thievery.

In another difficult to believe coincidence, another drunken G. I. goes off with a prostitute in Rome and tells her about how much better things were when the troops were first welcomed to the city. He tells her about the young woman with whom he fell in love then, failing to recognize that he is with her. Out of prostitute costume, she waits in the rain for him to meet her.

Next there is an English nurse in Florence, where she fell in love before the war. She refuses to go to Rome for R&R and instead accompanies a Florentine across the Arno (through deserted galleries of Uffizi), across rooftops, and through city streets raked by German snipers. The man she is going to meet has become the local resistance leader. (A case could be made that it is the Allied officers who don't understand her, and that the Florentines do.) The segment ends with a metaphorical stray bullet.

Next there are three military chaplains (one Catholic and speaking Italian, which the Jewish and Protestant ones don't) who want to spend a night in a monastery dating from before Columbus's voyage. The Catholic chaplain tells the monks that he has been with the other two chaplains 21 months (the length of the Italian campaign and, therefore, of the movie) and that trying to convert them to the "true faith" has not occurred to him. The monks are particularly scandalized to have a Jew in their midst and decide to fast in hope that the two infidels will see the light. (The monastery has very little food, but the chaplains provide more than enough for a meal for everyone, so I don't think that the fasting is a ruse, but I find it hard to believe that the Americans would go ahead or that the hearty Catholic chaplain who is the only one who understands what the monks are up to would go along as he does.)

After that pastoral and somewhat comic interlude, the film continues to its grimmest and most visually striking segment. A group of American soldiers and Italian partisans is huddled in the marshes, nearly out of ammunition and food. They sustain heavy casualties and are eventually captured. The film, thus, ends with a Nazi victory. . . and with ever more Italian casualties. For the most part, the Americans prosper, the Italians scrounge, suffer, and get shot.

Obviously, I have the feeling that to some degree "Paisą" is an Italian propaganda film. Many of the stories depend upon coincidences I find difficult to credit. Some of the dialogue is wooden (as far as I know, none of the parts were played by professional actors) and not all of the Italian dialogue is subtitled. (About half the dialogue is in English.)

The camera is not as fluid as in "Germany, Year Zero," the concluding film of Rossellini's trilogy, but there are many vivid images, especially of the Margellina caves, the rubble of Naples and Florence, the reeds of the Po sidestreams. As in "The Open City," the casualty rate is very high. Not least from being shot on location with available light, "Paisą" has a documentary look, as operatic(/melodramatic) as the denouements of many of the episodes are. Despite its episodic structure and the lack of continuity of characters from episode to episode, "Paisą" is as powerful as the other two films of end-of-the-war (and immediately after it) desperation, Though not strictly speaking "documentaries," these six slices of the Italian campaign and the other two early Rossellini films are documents of attitudes toward the retreating Nazis (totally negative) and the triumphant Americans (who are portrated as naive but well-intentioned), as well as being cinematic masterpieces by one of the most important directors of the 20th century (one who, after a collaboration on- and off-screen with Ingrid Bergman, made some austere historical films, the most widely distributed of which was "La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV," and the greatest of which was the Pirandelloish World War II tale "Il Generale della Rovere" with the other great Italian neo-realist director, Vittorio de Sica, playing the title role).

"Paisą" is available on somewhat dark videotape, but not on DVD. One can hope for a visually cleaned-up Criterion edition with newly translated and more complete subtitles. (There are not as many torrents of dialogue in "Paisą" as through the middle of "Germany, Year Zero.")


*Luchino Visconti is credited with coining the term "neo-realism" for "Ossessione," his 1942 adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice using available light and some nonactors. Even after warfare ended, that film could not be shown in America because it violated Cain's copyright.


Recommended:
Yes

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