Eleven – NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA

“Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”

– ANNA MAGNANI

PREFACE

In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the ombra di colosseo, expats gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour, we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs; delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is much appreciated-he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye watering in the fourth, café clearing in the sixth. And we enjoy Sundays, when the Ukrainian church congregation spills outside, bringing with it a close-harmony praise song. Everything else is complaint. Italian bureaucracy is impossible, the TV unwatchable, the government unbelievable, and the newspapers impenetrable. Expats in Rome are somehow able to consistently maintain their sense of outraged wonder, despite all reading The Dark Heart of Italy two years earlier on the plane over. Italian Women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. “The land that feminism forgot!” And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet there exist confusing countersigns. The new mothers with tiny babes-in-arm, welcome at any gathering. The four women chatting at the next table, a frank, practical conversation about sexual pleasure. The handsome lady grocer with her giant biceps and third-trimester belly, unpacking boxes of beer from the delivery truck, separating street fights, bullying her menfolk, lecturing the local drunks, overcharging the tourists, strategizing with the priests, running this piazza and everyone in it. Respected, desired, feared.

Such countersigns are not unified: they do not all point in one direction, and so as expats we find it difficult to process them-which may be the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant sensibility. The strongest countersign of all is Anna’s face. It follows you everywhere, staring out from restaurants, pub bathrooms, private houses, lined up on the display table of the edicolas, and writ large on the walls of the city itself, for this summer marks her centenary. Nannarella. Mamma Roma. La Magnani. Anna is a confusing countersign, in the land that feminism forgot.

1

A chorus of women sing in a radio studio. Plain women, not actresses, of early middle age, and dressed in black, with simple strands of pearls around their necks. The credits identify them as the RAI choir. [60] The lead soprano has a light but discernible mustache. The song is “Saria possibile?” (Could it be possible?) from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, a silly opera about a peasant who, in his desperation to woo a beautiful, unattainable woman, buys a love potion from a mountebank. (The potion turns out to be red wine.) Visconti pans through this choir dispassionately, even a little cruelly, as it responds with minute precision to the baton of a dashing male conductor. A chorus of Italian women, eager to please. The song ends; we move to a smaller studio. A young man at a desk speaks into the microphone, to announce the premise of the film:

We are looking for a girl between six and eight years. A pretty Italian girl. Take your girls to Stella Films in Cinecittà, Via Tuscolana, km 9. It could be your and her lucky day!

The next shot is unexpected. A great waste ground: what would seem to be the ruins of a city, with the blown-out frames of buildings and a mass of women and girl children, their best clothes on their backs (being transported? fleeing some disaster?). Another beat reveals its true, benign aspect: the outskirts of a movie studio. The frames are for set facades, as yet unfinished. The women are here to audition their girl children. But still men yell at them through megaphones. (“Keep quiet and stay calm!”) The camera stays very high. This is a pared-down, unfamiliar Visconti, a decade before the opulence of Il gattopardo. The borrowed severity of neorealismo is not quite natural to him. His instinctive tendency toward the fantastic has only been transferred from style to content, to the hopes of this great female chorus, who now push as one toward a narrow doorway.

A woman. A woman both like and not like the rest, in a black skirt suit, nipped waspishly at the waist, spilling out at both extremes, with black shoes and wild black hair and black pouches under her eyes, wailing like a heroine of the Greeks. She has lost her child! But the camera remains aloof, a gesture we might mistake for Visconti’s familiar misogyny, if it were not for what Magnani makes of the angle. Think of it as a gift from director to actress. We are so far from Magnani she is practically inaudible, yet this is no obstacle to comprehending her. We see her anger, panic, and desperation-and even that these emotions are both sincere and a little overdone, un po’ esagerato, in a calculated manner, in case the sympathy thus roused might help her case later. All this is put across with her hands (the natural advantage of Italian actors) but also in the stamp of her little foot, the way her hair flies from its bun, the way her hips bend forward and back in pantomime outrage. What a silent star Magnani would have been! Now she leaves the chorus and runs alone, across this desolate city, as she did in Roma, città aperta. The chorus passes through opportunity’s door without her.

Bellissima as a series of formal, ancient gestures, in which an all-female chorus threatens to swallow a single female actor, and from which that actor determinedly separates herself first, and then-by force of will-also a second actor, her child. A cinematic rerun of Aeschylus’s revolutionary innovation.

The chorus pushes forward toward a makeshift stage. The name of the fictional film is on the wall behind them-Oggi domani mai-but so is the name of the real film: Bellissima. The character of Director is also both fictional and real, Alessandro Blasetti. [61] He walks through the crowd (taking great care over his acting, wanting to get the playing of himself right) to the tune of Donizetti’s “Charlatan’s Theme,” although he did not know this at the time. (Visconti: “One day somebody told him about it. He wrote me an indignant letter: “Really, I’d never have believed you capable of such a thing,” and so on: and I replied: “Why? We’re all charlatans, us directors. It is we who put illusions into the heads of mothers and little girls… We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the assistants, the producers, the hangers-on-powerful men with their powerful boredom-climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves in attitudes of jolly contempt. In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-thing, always appraised by that measure. Today, tomorrow-this beauty contest is as old as the judgment of Paris. The descendants of these men still audition veline each Roman summer. As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles. Now, here, in postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile. “You’re starting early!” cries Blasetti.