Saw Rocco and His Brothers, a troubling Italian film. It revolves around five brothers who move from the tiny village into the big city, hoping for a better life. The film focuses on each brother one at a time, prefacing their segment with title cards. The main plot-line, central brother aside, revolves around a love triangle between Rocco, a boxing brother, and a whore. The boxer starts out as the big, lazy brother. As his boxing career takes off, he starts spending more time with the whore who playfully reminds him that she'll get "bored" of him someday. Sure enough, as his star fades, the whore vanishes only to take up with his brother, Rocco.
As the boxer self-destructs more and more, Rocco becomes saintlike, sacrificing his life, career, money, and happiness for the sake of his increasingly worthless brother. Another brother, gainfully employed at an auto plant, takes a law-and-order high tone, urging Rocco to let his brother fail (I am totally on this guy's side, btw) and urging the boxer to go on welfare and get a job. There's also a brother who has a family and is removed from the situation, and a younger brother who observes all of the proceedings and passes no judgement.
The film is frustrating in many ways. It makes Rocco be so good and inflates his importance by giving him the title. I have a hard dismissing his actions because they are exactly the endlessly forgiving, understanding traits that I associate with saintliness and goodness. The film repays his kindness with endless cruelty. Two scenes in particular stand out as tour de forces: a scene where the boxer confronts Rocco and the whore, and the scene (much later) when the boxer confronts the whore by herself. This second scene is intercut with a climactic boxing victory for Rocco (who also takes up boxing) and continues into a scene where the boxer crashes Rocco's victory party and things spiral into infinite Italian hysteria. (It's truly amazing. Out of context that scene would be hilarious. Of course in context it's gut-wrenching and terrible.)
As a drama, the film is a great success. It has a morbid, doomed, Mayor of Casterbridge-style feel, where man's inhumanity to man is the rich theme of the day. Much blame is heaped on the wicked city the brothers move to, but it's not believable. More than once a bit-character will point out that in the country they'd probably be just as miserable. True, Rocco rebuts, but out there they might not be the instruments of each others' misery. A tough film, but worth it for the drama. The (possible?) denunciation of the sacrifices of Rocco make me a bit uncomfortable, but it's the discomfort of being exposed to a new idea with troubling ramifications. So, good.
PS - The composer is the same guy who composed The Godfather soundtrack, and you can kind of tell.
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