La Strada is Federico Fellini’s moving masterpiece that explores the soul’s eternal conflict between the heart and mind. Zampano (Anthony Quinn) is a cruel, traveling carnival strongman who buys his assistant, a simple minded young woman named Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), from her poverty-stricken family. Gelsomina is innocent and childlike (Masina’s exquisite performance is as comic […]
With its baroque interiors and saturated compositions, Luca Guadagnino’s sprawling I Am Love recalls the melodramas of Luchino Visconti in its lush and operatic, if oddly clinical and overwrought treatise on passion, identity, and destiny. And like Visconti’s The Leopard, a majestic dinner party also foretells the end of a way of life: the retirement […]
After having missed the first hour of The Best of Youth when it screened at the 2003 New York Film Festival, I had constructed a mental scenario of what happened in that first hour that would have reconciled the way the film eventually unfolded. I had thought that Giorgia, the institutionalized young woman, was Nicola […]
Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite (Immagini disturbate da un intenso parassita), 1970 Paolo Gioli’s frenetic, delirious, and curiously transfixing magnum opus Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite is an invigorating, confounding, and ultimately mind-blowing visual study in redefining the bounds of human cognitive saturation – a complex, multilayered juxtaposition of bifurcating and intersecting aural […]
A young woman dressed in somber clothing named Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) impassively, but determinedly, navigates her way through a provincial Sicilian town on her way to confession trailed by a lumbering, but accommodating chaperone (Rosetta Urzì). A less than nurturing audience with the attending priest at the confessional soon reveals the reason for her seeming […]
Alberto Lattuada irreverently – and uproariously – explores the nurtured regionalisms, preconceptions, and ethnic stereotypes between the more progressive, industrialized north and more conservative, old world traditions of southern Italy – and in particular, Sicily – that continue to pervade and shape the social attitudes between the two divergent cultures of contemporary Italian society in […]