Changing My Mind (25 page)

NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA

—ANNA MAGNANI

In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the
ombra di colosseo
, expats gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour, we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs; delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is much appreciated—he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye watering in the fourth, café clearing in the sixth. And we enjoy Sundays, when the Ukrainian church congregation spills outside, bringing with it a close-harmony praise song. Everything else is complaint. Italian bureaucracy is impossible, the TV unwatchable, the government unbelievable, and the newspapers impenetrable. Expats in Rome are somehow able to consistently maintain their sense of outraged wonder, despite all reading
The Dark Heart of Italy
two years earlier on the plane over. Italian Women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. “The land that feminism forgot!” And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet there exist confusing countersigns. The new mothers with tiny babes-in-arm, welcome at any gathering. The four women chatting at the next table, a frank, practical conversation about sexual pleasure. The handsome lady grocer with her giant biceps and third-trimester belly, unpacking boxes of beer from the delivery truck, separating street fights, bullying her menfolk, lecturing the local drunks, overcharging the tourists, strategizing with the priests, running this piazza and everyone in it. Respected, desired, feared.

Such countersigns are not unified: they do not all point in one direction, and so as expats we find it difficult to process them—which may be the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant sensibility. The strongest countersign of all is Anna’s face. It follows you everywhere, staring out from restaurants, pub bathrooms, private houses, lined up on the display table of the
edicolas,
and writ large on the walls of the city itself, for this summer marks her centenary.
Nannarella
. Mamma Roma. La Magnani. Anna is a confusing countersign, in the land that feminism forgot.

A chorus of women sing in a radio studio. Plain women, not actresses, of early middle age, and dressed in black, with simple strands of pearls around their necks. The credits identify them as the RAI choir.
⁶⁰
The lead soprano has a light but discernible mustache. The song is “Saria possibile?” (Could it be possible?) from Donizetti’s
L’elisir d’amore
, a silly opera about a peasant who, in his desperation to woo a beautiful, unattainable woman, buys a love potion from a mountebank. (The potion turns out to be red wine.) Visconti pans through this choir dispassionately, even a little cruelly, as it responds with minute precision to the baton of a dashing male conductor. A chorus of Italian women, eager to please. The song ends; we move to a smaller studio. A young man at a desk speaks into the microphone, to announce the premise of the film:

The next shot is unexpected. A great waste ground: what would seem to be the ruins of a city, with the blown-out frames of buildings and a mass of women and girl children, their best clothes on their backs (being transported? fleeing some disaster?). Another beat reveals its true, benign aspect: the outskirts of a movie studio. The frames are for set facades, as yet unfinished. The women are here to audition their girl children. But still men yell at them through megaphones. (“Keep quiet and stay calm!”) The camera stays very high. This is a pared-down, unfamiliar Visconti, a decade before the opulence of
Il gattopardo
. The borrowed severity of
neorealismo
is not quite natural to him. His instinctive tendency toward the fantastic has only been transferred from style to content, to the hopes of this great female chorus, who now push as one toward a narrow doorway.

A woman. A woman both like and not like the rest, in a black skirt suit, nipped waspishly at the waist, spilling out at both extremes, with black shoes and wild black hair and black pouches under her eyes, wailing like a heroine of the Greeks. She has lost her child! But the camera remains aloof, a gesture we might mistake for Visconti’s familiar misogyny, if it were not for what Magnani makes of the angle. Think of it as a gift from director to actress. We are so far from Magnani she is practically inaudible, yet this is no obstacle to comprehending her. We see her anger, panic, and desperation—and even that these emotions are both sincere and a little overdone,
un po’ esagerato,
in a calculated manner, in case the sympathy thus roused might help her case later. All this is put across with her hands (the natural advantage of Italian actors) but also in the stamp of her little foot, the way her hair flies from its bun, the way her hips bend forward and back in pantomime outrage. What a silent star Magnani would have been! Now she leaves the chorus and runs alone, across this desolate city, as she did in
Roma, città aperta
. The chorus passes through opportunity’s door without her.

Bellissima
as a series of formal, ancient gestures, in which an all-female chorus threatens to swallow a single female actor, and from which that actor determinedly separates herself first, and then—by force of will—also a second actor, her child. A cinematic rerun of Aeschylus’s revolutionary innovation.

The chorus pushes forward toward a makeshift stage. The name of the fictional film is on the wall behind them—
Oggi domani mai—
but so is the name of the real film:
Bellissima
. The character of Director is also both fictional and real, Alessandro Blasetti.
⁶¹
He walks through the crowd (taking great care over his acting, wanting to get the playing of himself right) to the tune of Donizetti’s “Charlatan’s Theme,” although he did not know this at the time. (Visconti: “One day somebody told him about it. He wrote me an indignant letter: “Really, I’d never have believed you capable of such a thing,” and so on: and I replied: “Why? We’re all charlatans, us directors. It is we who put illusions into the heads of mothers and little girls. . . . We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the assistants, the producers, the hangers-on—powerful men with their powerful boredom—climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves in attitudes of jolly contempt. In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-thing, always appraised by that measure. Today, tomorrow—this beauty contest is as old as the judgment of Paris. The descendants of these men still audition
veline
⁶²
each Roman summer. As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles. Now, here, in postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile. “You’re starting early!” cries Blasetti.

Bellissima
, in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema. Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina Apicella), to be a star. She will use whatever she has—her savings, her own sympathetic sex appeal—in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians call a
raccomandazione di ferro.
⁶³
In the end, she gets what she wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel, and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her. But though the cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to be Visconti’s. “The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later. “The whole subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept. To allow Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was
actually in the hazard
. Which is not possible. Magnani as a personality being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy. Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs. Her character—played by anyone else—is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child. But no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani. Everything she wants— certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected fame—she wants directly, in a straight and open manner, as men are said to want things. Her dream is strategic, not delusional. And in her mind, the child remains only a child,
come tutte
: “Well, at that age they’re
all
pretty.” This is her sensible reply to a calculated compliment from the slick young stranger, Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a production assistant low down in the Cinecittà food chain who is willing to do certain favors in exchange for certain favors—the oldest of Italian stories. “Yes, that’s true,” he agrees. “But I prefer their mothers.” Annovazzi is younger than Maddalena, skinnier, and in a bland cinematic sense, better looking. But she knows as we know: he is the shadow of her shadow. On the other hand, he has access to the director, Blasetti. All this passes through Magnani’s face in a mannerist instant: a sharp glance in which she responds at once to the cheek of the boy and the perfect civility and necessity of the compliment. (It would be rude of him not to notice that she is a goddess!) Few actresses are so directly appreciative of their own earthy, natural attractions. On-screen, Magnani is the opposite of neurotic.

The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity.
I made her what she is today
may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani—the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman—is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe—her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her.
Mi raccomando, eh?—uffa!—per carità!—abbia pazienza!—O dio mio!—come no?—meno male!
Italian is a language packed with verbal
fillers
. Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need—smile or insult—in order to let her pass. In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry. Blasetti: “But I said the child has to be six or seven years old, not less . . . she looks a bit small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.” The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts adoration and contempt.
All women are artificial. All women are, in the end, actresses. Womanhood itself is an act!
But Magnani turns the proposition on its head. She is the incarnation of that paradoxical imperative:
act natural.
She is always and everywhere apparently without artifice, spontaneous, just another Roman woman
come tutte.
Which leads to a strange conclusion: the actor isn’t acting—the
character
is acting. For isn’t it
Maddalena
, and not Magnani, who puts on a bit of an act now and then, when circumstances call for it?