Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
by Luchino Visconti
An absolute masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers by Luchino Visconti is a powerful novel in cinematic form with deep layers. Intellectual and popular, Freudian and Marxist, Dostoevskian and Verghian, it is the summation of an author, of Italian cinema at its historic peak, and of an expanded idea of film production. Above all, it is a gaze capable of combining in a single film opera, melodrama, psychological noir, and socio-anthropological influences. A marvel, yesterday, today, and always. Re-released in theaters for the 120th anniversary of Goffredo Lombardo’s Titanus.
Sound of Destruction
Having been widowed, Rosaria Parondi decides to leave Lucania to join her eldest son, Vincenzo, who had moved to Milan some time ago seeking better living conditions. Rosaria is accompanied by her other four sons, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, and Luca, all of various ages. While a family conflict threatens to ruin Vincenzo’s marriage to the beautiful Ginetta, Simone decides to pursue a boxing career, encouraged by Nadia, a neighbor who earns her living as a prostitute. Simone soon loses his head over Nadia, but Rocco’s presence, a man so good and generous to the point of self-destruction, triggers a series of unforeseen and dramatic consequences for the entire family…
“It’s an ugly thing, Ciro. You can’t imagine how ugly.” Having achieved the first in a long series of sporting and professional successes destined to radically change his life, Rocco Parondi, emblematic of boundless goodness and generosity, discovers the evil within himself. In the ring where he has just defeated an opponent, he has fought against someone else, against a synthetic figure of accumulated hatred over the years, which the young man from Lucania only becomes aware of in that excruciating piece of dialogue with his brother Ciro. If a direct literary model for the angelic Rocco has already been traced in Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin from The Idiot (1869), on the other hand, the consciousness of evil in him arises through a path more connected to socio-anthropological reasons. A constant narrator of family disintegrations set in various geographies and historical epochs, Luchino Visconti prepares with Rocco and His Brothers (1960) to give body and voice to the dramatic disintegrating power of modernity, confronted with social, cultural, anthropological, psychological, and family structures from the unknown Italian South. The traditional family, the self-sufficient cell that nevertheless shows forms of spontaneous collectivism, the destiny of one being the destiny of all; in such an undoubtedly compact and unified context, there is no place for evil. Evil emerges, if anything, from the discovery of individualism, from the model of a modern society that constantly demands choices and decisions, robust individual interventions on one’s destiny. Rocco finds himself a stranger to himself, filled with a nameless and faceless hatred because the new world he encountered in Milan asks him to fight for his happiness, while his happiness would lie in withdrawing from the fray of life to return to the collective community (the Southern family) where the individual is never questioned because the interest of all always prevails over the self.
Yet…yet. Of the traditional family model, Visconti records the most devastating of explosions (the film opens with an orchestral sound of destruction, later echoed in the explosion at the beginning of Conversation Piece, 1974), but at the same time does not hide its many dark sides. Mother Rosaria is a sort of dictator who arbitrarily grants and withdraws affection with a constant attitude of emotional blackmail. An ambivalent Medea who both moves and equally engenders hatred for her enslaving approach towards her children – as soon as she arrives in Milan, she immediately invests Vincenzo with the role of successor to the duties of the deceased father. And, even if for a good cause, the elderly widow sees only the mirage of economic well-being as the only possible true happiness. Those of her children who fail in life are not worthy of being her children anymore. Meanwhile, the worm enters the minds of the brothers, gnawing away at self-determination and self-esteem. In the face of Simone’s gradual descent into personal degradation, he is granted a moment of piercing lucidity at the height of the drama; returning home after Nadia’s murder and greeted by Rosaria’s concern, Simone angrily yells at Rocco to finally silence their mother, almost blasphemously breaking the bond of respect towards the sanctified maternal figure. The accusation is clear; the Parondi brothers’ psychologies, so serene upon their arrival in Milan and so exasperated and tortured by the end, are the result of a bloody clash with modernity and the expectations, nurtured by the mirage of progress, that mother Rosaria has instilled and shaped in her children. Though boiling with exacerbated passions, in love with its screams and conflicts taken to the extreme, Rocco and His Brothers is actually marked by a dry Marxist/Gramscian critique of the magnificent and progressive fate of an Italy identified in one of its economic growth hubs, the dark Milan mostly documented by Visconti in the smoky suburbs populated by the unemployed.
Ultimately, it is still the cultural genocide of Pasolini’s memory. An entire Italy disappears, ancestral social structures vanish. However, Visconti does not mythologize that lost unity; he records its demolition as yet another phenomenology of the modern, whose irruption in Italy reaches its peak precisely in the years the film is conceived and realized. None of the characters, in the end, garner much sympathy from Visconti. Another great culprit, Rocco lives so far from reality that he cannot translate ethics into practice – splendid in this sense (but certainly not a new discovery) is the alternating montage between Rocco’s triumph in the ring and Nadia’s murder at the Idroscalo (“Cover yourself! Cover yourself!”), ideally linking Rocco and Simone’s responsibilities in a single guilt. Ciro, who intends to break the wall of family silence but driven by the discovery of individual interest, is certainly not to be loved. In Rocco and His Brothers, every choice is double, in every desire there is both good and evil. Strengthened by the ethics of work, honesty, and personal growth, Ciro actually emerges as a perfect example of the second generation, distant from the idea of common destiny that with lights and shadows characterized his family until a few years earlier. He is the man of the future, Ciro. The man of progress, as evidenced by the hopeful final speech (almost a Socialist Realist parenthesis) about the Italian future. The man of the future who, as such, severs all ties with the past – he no longer remembers the dialect and Lucanian proverbs, has no nostalgia for the homeland. It is no coincidence that Rocco seals the end of everything when Ciro decides to denounce Simone. “Everything is over now”: Ciro’s act is the final seal on the Parondi’s disintegration because it directly impacts the individual’s responsibility towards others – paradoxically, the silence to protect the family’s compactness is the ultimate act of responsibility for the other’s life. No act of assuming responsibility for the other’s life is more definite than silencing their faults. After all, guilt is the only true absolute Italian psychology that allows the family system to stay firmly standing – almost unbearable, in the penultimate scene, is Rocco’s scream in bed, attributing Nadia’s death to himself.
If Visconti loves someone (and we love her too), he loves Nadia. The female character who pays the most because she is honest with herself, the only one truly ready to risk everything, even her life. Rocco and His Brothers sinks this seismic family destruction into a rich literary humus. A film that works intensely on myths and archetypes, the Visconti masterpiece seeks with equal visceral fury models elevated to its dominant popular appeal. The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, a base of Italian verismo reinterpreted in light of operatic melodrama: Visconti immerses the structure of La Terra Trema (1948) in a bath of exciting expressive excesses. And, more directly and immediately, the stories of Giovanni Testori collected in Il Ponte della Ghisolfa, from which Visconti adopts the characters’ names and various situations, often remixing their inspiration into a new narrative form – see, for example, the fate of the character of Duilio Morini, a very veiled homosexual in the film. Visconti seems to keep well in mind both the 1950s American cinema dedicated to restless youth – especially in the film’s central section, closed by the sequence of Nadia’s rape and the subsequent fight between Rocco and Simone, reminiscences of the cinema of young James Dean and Marlon Brando emerge, and obviously the great lesson of Jean Renoir’s cinema and French realism. Rocco and His Brothers does not fear being superficially basic (but profoundly layered) nor gradually reducing its characters to the most immediate and visceral passions. In reality, in this tangle of hopes and family prisons, a ballet of destinies takes place, once again imprisoning the characters in slavery to each other. Rocco will be a successful boxer without joy. He steals Simone’s destiny to try in vain to save him, binding himself forever to a profession he has never loved. Conversely, Simone steals happiness from Rocco in the most atrocious way. “Rocco Parondi wins.” An entire socio-anthropological model loses, swept away by the furious advance of progress and simultaneously causing a terribly destructive conflict with modern Italy, which also feeds the illusion of a generalized well-being within everyone’s reach. It is not so. Rocco ends his arc by transforming into an unprecedented myth on the front pages of newspapers, devoid of any desire and will, reabsorbed into a new mass media society, entirely depersonalizing. The masses of Alfa Romeo workers return to the factory, called by the end-of-break siren. And little Luca gets lost in the city’s landscape along a De Chirico-like road. Though longing to return to his village, he too likely heads towards conformity. The Italy of the Parondis is over; it no longer exists. Nadia opens her arms to welcome death.
Massimiliano Schiavoni
Quinlan, July 10, 2024
