And then we watched...

VIAGGIO IN ITALIA (VOYAGE TO ITALY) - Italian, 1953 - director Roberto Rossellini.

Never know what you will discover on Turner Classic Movies. Last week we caught this gem on a night they were running some neo-realist films of Italian director Roberto Rossellini. "Voyage to Italy" is from 1953, the period when the legendary director was working with his love and muse, Ingrid Bergman... perhaps you will recall "Stromboli?"

The story is slight but involving... interesting to us as a chance to witness the manners and morals of a British couple vacationing in Italy, in the vicinity of Naples in the early 1950's. Alex Joyce (George Sanders) is a successful businessman, and Katherine (Miss Bergman) is his bored, slightly neurotic wife. The upper-scale couple have come to Italy to claim an inheritance, an estate left them by a beloved uncle. They plan to take possession, put the villa up for sale, and then return to Britain as quickly as possible. Having not spent so much time together in a long time, they realize their marriage is not working as it should. Their nerves start to fray, and even little differences are not easily resolved. Katherine had always wanted children, a topic Alex will not entertain... too busy! They begin to spend time apart during the day, Alex goes off to Capri with old friends he's met - a little flirtation is involved, and Katherine hangs back, touring the local museums in Naples, or just lounging in the Italian sun. To her, the environs recall an old love who knew Italy well, a poet who died, yet just the mention of him seems to drive Alex to a fury. Things deteriorate and a divorce is proposed.

As the film progresses, there are occasions to see the sights around the bay of Naples in the context of the story. Vesuvius looms behind them in many scenes (a symbol of the destruction of their marriage?) and in one very affecting scene, they go to Pompeii with an archeologist friend to witness the pouring of a capture mold.

In an explosion of the volcano in the first century AD, some residents of the ancient city were swallowed so quickly by the rain of volcanic ash, that they were caught in their everyday activities. The accumulated ash hardened and encased them in what might be considered a time capsule. Gradually the organic material of their bodies disappeared, leaving an empty space which they once filled. In the twentieth century, archeologists found that by pouring a plaster material into the spaces when they were found, an exact mold of the deceased victims could be formed, so that when the hardened volcanic material is chipped and swept away, a sort of living statue is revealed... a slave carrying a water jug, a young boy clutching a dog, an infant sleeping in a crib, and so forth.

As fate would have it, the mold Alex and Katherine witness is discovered to be that of a man and a woman lying side by side holding hands. Later they witness a local religious pageant in which children are following and singing behind a icon of the Madonna; Katherine gets swept into the crowd as by a flood (or flow of lava) and she calls out to Alex to save her, when moments before they were not speaking to one another. Events such as these lead the couple to face the possibility that they may have been acting in pettiness and haste. Is a more positive resolution possible?

"Journey to Italy" is remarkable because to the psychological insight that Rossellini brings to the modern relationship. He had just gone through a divorce in order to be with Miss Bergman, and she was in self-exile from Hollywood because her affair with the Italian director was considered a scandal. The film uses mood, symbolic imagery and nuanced dialog to give insight. It tends to avoid the maudlin and melodramatic. Though the movie was a box-office failure, it has since been reassessed, especially by French crtics and New Wave directors like Truffaut, who have labeled it "the first truly modern film." It is on the list of the BFI top fifty motion pictures of all time.

We were a bit put off by watching the Italian language version, because we suspect a voice actor might have been employed for Mr. Sanders, but in the end the experience was a good one for us, in part because the location filming, the panoramas of Naples, Vesuvius and the Pompeiian ruins give the film an air of captured time... a historicity that accentuates the link between lived time and remembered past.