The Two Rossellinis: A Daughter Remarks On Her Father's Masterpiece

It's a rarefied group that can not only sport singluar genius but boast connection to said. It's even rarer to be able to claim such status with mutliple game-changers. Isabella Rossellini is not merely a bold road-paver in the modern film era in her role as actress & producer, she is also the daughter of the man who brought neorealism to the world stage in the mid-40's, and the object d'art of the man who forever destroyed the Hollywood notion of innocent Americana in the 80's (if you have to ask, just bail out now). In both men's wake populist cinema would never quite be the same, the camera never trusted in the same way by the audience. As a child of one of Hollywood's most fabulous scandalos, one that blackballed the immensely popular Ingrid Bergman for the crime of following her heart, albeit out of wedlock, the woman was seemingly born into the realm of the wondrously controversial. For one night and two screenings last week, she graced moviegoers at Film Forum with a Q&A and intro, in that reverse order, regarding her father's initial masterwork, Roberto Rossellini's ROME OPEN CITY. She began her interaction with eager film fans by providing a short introduction to neorealism for the neophyte. The woman expounded thus;

It was a new style of film, no more only to entertain, or distract. To get as close as they could to life itself. A mixture of professional actors and non-actors. My father always said that even if you work with a wonderful actor like Cary Grant, it'll always be Cary Grant as a fisherman, Cary Gant as a taxi driver. So he needed to have the real face of the fisherman, the skin burned by the sun, hands shaped by the work. There was more realism in that. Of course, in Italy, a lot of the films were dubbed. The sound was recorded later. It was not direct sound. So my father picked people for their looks, and dubbed the dialogue later, which was sometimes disturbing for an American audience.

Did your father ever remark upon the influence this film had on the cinema?

Yes, but I'm not sure he was interested. He always said to me he felt the imperative to make OPEN CITY, PAISAN, that it was a moral imperative, to let the world know what Italians were experiencing during the war. Not from the political side, but from the people. How human beings suffered. He didn't want to produce entertaining propaganda, he wanted to show what was happening in Rome under Mussolini. My father was from Rome. The story of Anna Magnani's character was true, they knew that had happenned, that a pregnant woman had been gunned down by the Nazis. Some who had witnessed the actual event advised my father, and even appeared in the scene.

Wasn't the scene also based on something that had happenned to Magnani? Not being gunned down, of course, but chasing her lover through a crowd of soldiers?

That could be true. Though my father and Anna Magnani were lovers at the time, and he was a very jealous man, so maybe she didn't tell him that story. My father was REALLY Italian when it came to women.

Has your reaction to your father's films changed over the years?

You know, in 2006, my father would've been 100 years old, and MoMA did a retrospective of his work. I went every night for a month to see my father's films. It was fantastic. It was an incredible experience, to be with my father again, watching all the films all together. I really saw his spirit, his humor, his intensity, his compassion. Here in ROME, OPEN CITY there is humor in it, along with the tragic, because life is like that.

If anything's changed, Italy has changed. We used to be very ugly. Now we're very beautiful. It wasn't just the war, Italy used to be very poor, what we now call a third-world country. Italians were short and they probably only ate pasta or bread. But now, you see Dolce & Gabanna, Valentino. In my father's day you could see in the faces of the non-actors the hunger, the malnutrition. He was telling the story of Italy as it was. He was almost like an historian.

Was it difficult for your father to produce a film like ROME, OPEN CITY so close to the end of WWII? Were Italian audiences ready to accept such an honest depiction of life during wartime?

Well, it's interesting that you use the word produced. There was really no money or budget, no script or schedule. My father got a lot of his film stock from American productions that were shooting propaganda films on location. If they had leftover film stock he acquired it cheap. The success of the film is really due to American audiences. When the film came out in Italy, my father always quoted a critic who wrote that your dirty laundry should always be washed in your home, that my father was showing our dirty laundry to the world. It was considered an embarassment. In America it did a lot to reshape our identity, to show the human faces behind the horrible fascism. Once it was a success in America it was successful at home. Italians are always ready to embrace success!

Do you see history repeating itself? What's your view about how things are going in the world?

Do you mean the war in Iraq? As it compares to neorealism? I don't know! I'm an actress!

Roberto Rossellini's ROME OPEN CITY screens today through Thursday (barring a reprieve hold-over) at Film Forum in a revelatory new 2K DCP restoration.

Isabella Rossellini continues to class up the planet wherever she strides.