THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN THE SCREEN When Vittorio De Sica died a few months ago, he had just released a last film which is remarkable because it could easily have been his first film. It has been a...
...The parallel construction that De Sica put on Clara's story binds her present happiness to her past unhappi-ness...
...All De Sica's great films have been stories of how people either exercise or acquire this capacity to endure, and the reason all his characters have needed such a capacity is that they have all been exiles in life, outsiders who had no choice except to endure hardship...
...yet again, by reminding us of her life back home, the gift at the sanitarium becomes more an omen of her return to that life than a diversion from it...
...But in the mountains the light is dazzling, everything is white, and everything works as it should...
...The one condition can never escape its association with the other...
...In the end a doctor who has flirted with Clara and been rejected sees that she is having an affair with someone else, and he immediately declares her cured so that she is banished back to the squalor of her home...
...At home everything is dirty, nothing works, and the weather is always overcast...
...Often in the earlier films, the only thing that mitigates for us the characters' suffering is the implication that life at its best is not really much different from what it is at its worst...
...Like her family, the people at the sanitarium ultimately seem to make demands on Clara in ways that also use and even abuse her...
...Back home, before she could bring herself to go to the doctor's for her examination, she had to buy some new underwear and a bath at a public spa...
...Like other things that happen at the sanitarium, this incident seems almost to mock the grim routine of Clara's life back home...
...The fact is that the only society into which Clara really fits, the only decent company for her to keep, is that of Umberto, Antonio and all the other extraordinary, lonely figures with whom De Sica peopled the screen...
...Yet this final film, A Brief Vacation, again renews and extends the vision that those Neo-Realist films established as De Sica's own...
...Having had to pay for necessities before, Clara is now given luxuries...
...Clara only just returns from that ordeal when the model pleads with her to come along while she sees her boyfriend...
...Whereas most of De Sica's earlier films deal with periods of extreme adversity in their characters' lives, this film is about a period of relative happiness...
...This time it is done voluntarily and as a romantic gesture-the girl is staging a hunger strike because a doctor she was having an affair with has been transferred-but the very frivolousness of the girl's gesture only makes us more aware of how it compares with Clara's missed meal earlier...
...The parallel construction is also typical of the way De Sica always expressed this sense he had of life...
...That matched pair of shots, like all the matched episodes in Clara's story, sustains a kind of momentum in life, a capacity for simple endurance, which seems for De Sica to transcend all other emotions...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ERBECK, JR...
...Her last day at her job, for instance, she became so exhausted that she fell asleep over her lunch in the factory commissary and missed getting anything to eat...
...From the satanic mill where she works wielding, literally, a hose of fire, she is transported to the cool, snowbound world of the northern mountains...
...But at the sanitarium she is from the beginning just as much an outsider, for the whole premise of such a place is that one should want to leave it...
...It has been a quarter of a century since De Sica did his classic work- Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D-as part of the Neo-Realist movement in Italy...
...All her friends want to do so, but she of course would like to stay...
...But at the sanitarium she finds herself in the company of well-to-do women who befriend her...
...But this doesn't represent any basic change in De Sica's sentiments...
...Now the shot inverts what Umberto saw the night before and controverts the finality of what he felt...
...Her first day in the commissary at the sanitarium, she walks into a scene where a girl at her table is also missing her meal...
...And when she rediscovers this man up at the sanitarium, her brother-in-law again becomes an interloper by unexpectedly driving the family up for a visit just as Clara is on her way to meet her lover...
...The happiness that is experienced by Clara (Florinda Bolkan) in A Brief Vacation is a result of her being sent to a sanitarium to recuperate from TB...
...At home, her husband, his brother and his mother all suck the life out of her by their loveless dependence...
...It makes us see the two as inseparable...
...But he hasn't jumped, and the next morning when he leaves, as he looks up at his room one last time from the street, the camera again assumes a point-of-view shot...
...The camera assumes a point-of-view shot, showing us the street as Umberto sees it, and then suddenly zooms down on the cobblestones below as if Umberto were jumping...
...As distinct a contrast as the world of the sanitarium presents, however, from the time Clara arrives there life at the sanitarium begins to coincide in odd ways with her life back home...
...She met him the day she went to the doctor's, when she allowed him to buy her coffee until her brother-in-law happened to see them together...
...When one of her girlfriends tries to kill herself because she can't face her disease, Clara is elected to go see her in the hospital and is drawn into a bitter fight the woman is having with the nuns and doctors...
...Umberto turned out of his rooms, Antonio turned out of his job in The Bicycle Thief, the Finzi-Continis turned out of their garden, Clara turned out of the sanitarium: what they all share is the fate of being dispossessed, disenfranchised, cut off, stranded...
...It is a world almost without light...
...The culmination of her new life at the sanitarium is an affair she has with another patient...
...At home she is buried alive by the demands her invalid husband, in-laws and children make upon her...
...He is everything her grasping, exploitative husband isn't, but he too is nonetheless an echo of her life back home...
...But at the sanitarium, when one of her new friends, a model, departs, she leaves behind a whole table of cosmetics and clothes for Clara...
...A Brief Vacation may show us the other side of the picture, but it is the same picture De Sica had been painting since he began as a director...
...His films have always suggested a sort of two-sidedness to human experience...
...The model says she needs moral support to resist the fellow's overtures to leave, but after Clara submits to the embarrassment of this confrontation, her friend at once gives in to the man as if that's what she wanted to do all the time...
...Clara is an outsider in both her own family and the sanitarium where she momentarily escapes from that family...
...In Umberto D there is a moment when Umberto looks out the window of the lodgings from which he is being evicted and contemplates suicide...
...Precisely because of the happiness the sanitarium affords her, Clara is really alienated there as she was at home...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
