Bitter Rice

I was at the BFI this week to see Bitter Rice (1949), a classic Italian neorealist film that also draws on elements of film noir and (in its climactic scene) the Western. It has four fine, photogenic lead actors: young Vittorio Gassman as a charming thief, Doris Dowling as his reluctant partner in crime who hides in a train full of women leaving Turin to plant rice in the Po Valley, Raf Vallone (an actor who had once played in midfield for Torino) as the good guy, a soldier stationed near the paddy fields, and, most notably, the extraordinary nineteen-year old Silvana Mangano (above) in a star making role as one of the rice workers. Its director Giuseppe De Santis, like the later nouvelle vague auteurs, had started out as a film journalist. In 1941 he wrote an article called 'For an Italian Landscape', arguing that there are 'some emotions that man cannot give voice to so we must draw on everything that surrounds him to express them.' The rice fields (which have recently suffered severe drought) act in this way, a sunlit tree-fringed mirror when the workers first arrive and a churned-up sea of mud when torrential rain threatens their livelihood.   

Pasquale Ionnane recently included Bitter Rice on a list of 10 Great Italian Pastoral Films. Although his choices are set in rural Italy you wouldn't necessarily think of them as landscape films, although I did once write a blog post here about one of them, Le Quattro Volte. The list includes Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders (2014) and he quotes an interview with her from when it was released: “my desire to show the changes the Italian landscape has gone through – the transformation of the countryside from a place of work to a theme park celebrating ancient values […] I wanted to show how agricultural work in the here and now isn’t being safeguarded.” Rohrwacher's next feature film Happy as Lazzaro was set in a landscape lost in time (not exactly an idyll though...) Her most recent one La Chimera, which I saw with my son a couple of weeks ago (we loved it), concerns the search for Etruscan antiquities lying underneath the Italian landscape.