Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti, 1960): BFI Southbank NFT2, 1.30pm & 6.45pm
This film, which is on an extended run through January, is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
The screenings on Sunday January 5th (15:00 NFT1) and Saturday January 11th (17:30 NFT1) (+ intro by season curator and film critic Christina Newland) will screen on 35mm.
Time Out review:
Luchino Visconti’s epic melodrama of social migration and
moral decay was first released in 1960, when it was met with great
scandal (a prosecutor threatened to charge the director with
“disseminating an obscene object”) and even greater success. Today,
distanced from ridiculous controversy and dislocated from the provincial
politics that drive its story, this immaculately restored classic of
post-WWII Italian cinema often feels like a new experience altogether. Set in the early ’60s, when Italy’s moneyed Northern
classes were regularly exploiting the people of the South for cheap
labor, Visconti’s shaggy tale begins with the hardscrabble Parondi
family moving from rural Lucania up to industrial Milan, where recently
widowed Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) and her four sons hope to find a better
life. “My family arrived like an earthquake,” sighs Vincenzo, the
eldest son who’s already in Milan, to his fiancée (a young Claudia
Cardinale) after his mother and siblings crash their engagement party
and interrupt the first strains of the flowing Nino Rota score that
would earn the composer a gig on The Godfather. From there, Visconti paves the way for rollicking family sagas like 2003’s The Best of Youth,
unspooling his tale across three brisk hours and five overlapping
chapters, one for each of the Parondi boys. Over time, idealistic Rocco
(Delon, magnetic even when dubbed by an actor who pronounces his
character’s name as though it were spelled with eight rs),
closeted older brother Simone (Salvatori) and local prostitute Nadia
(Girardot, sensational) emerge as the true focal points. Stubbornly attached to the clannish virtues of his
father’s generation, Rocco can’t help but forgive Simone even his most
violent transgressions—including Nadia’s brutal semipublic rape—as his
moral absolutism rots into something perverse as he tries to hold the
family together. Watching the film so far removed from the time of its
making underlines the tragedy of Rocco’s anachronistic nature and
compensates for the increasing clumsiness of Visconti’s more topical
subplots. “The world’s a one-way street,” Girardot’s character blithely
declares, but Rocco still can’t see that he’s speeding toward a dead
end.
David Ehrlich
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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