THE NANNY (Marco Bellocchio, 1999)

“Solitude will destroy you,” the doctor tells his patient; but, without his knowing it, solitude is destroying the doctor, much as the divide between classes, playing out in clashes between demonstrators and the military in the streets, threatens to undo Italy. Into his posh home, Mori, this psychiatrist, brings Annetta, a peasant, separating her from her own infant with her imprisoned radical lover to nurse his baby, which his wife, Vittoria, has all but rejected soon after giving birth.
     Vittoria abandons her child when she feels inadequate to the task of being a mother; Annetta violates her contract with Mori, sneaking away to nurse her own child so as not to abandon her heart’s ties.
     Rome. It is shortly after the turn of the century; but Marco Bellocchio, inspired by a Luigi Pirandello story, hasn’t concocted a period piece. Rather, La balia unfolds as a dream of the past. When Mori seeks a wet nurse, a flock of young women in the street move into the frame from screen-right, as if appearing from nowhere. Indoors, they are lined up for inspection, naked from the waist up. His colleague warns Mori that Annetta looks pale, but her selection is a foregone conclusion; Mori had earlier noticed her from his carriage—part of a rush of street images suggesting the new art of cinema.
     Bellocchio’s visually very dark film seems to emanate from some collective unconscious as characters grope to understand themselves and others. Mori runs a sanatorium for mentally ill women, making little headway; but patriarchic society liberally imposes the designation “mentally ill” on women the better to manage and control things.
     The doctor comes alive when he starts teaching Annetta how to read. This also leads to his becoming a loving father to his child.

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN (George O. Nichols, 1912)

Robert Browning penned the greatest Victorian poem, The Ring and the Book. Spouse Elizabeth’s The Cry of the Children, for all its social import, is maudlin. The worst part of the same-titled independent U.S. film consists of title cards excerpting it.
     A couple and their three daughters, except for Alice, the youngest, work in a mill, and the scenes of labor in the mill, especially those of child labor, nearly match scenes from Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in pitting small humanity against huge, vast, efficient machines. (Newsreel clips blend in with the fiction.) These gritty scenes of constant drudgery are surpassed by the end of the day, when faces and forms, bereft of all spark of energy, file out. The mill owner, leisured because the work of others keep him rich, has a childless marriage. This couple try coaxing Alice’s parents to sell them Alice; the working-class couple refuses, with Alice herself recoiling. But a strike at the mill, pursuing a living wage, breaks the family and the mother’s health; when she is too sick to return to work after the workers’ defeat, Alice’s mother is replaced at the mill by little Alice herself. Now Alice is willing to be adopted by the barren owner and wife, but they reject her as damaged goods now that labor has crushed her attractive spirit. Besides, the owner’s wife has already filled the empty space in her heart with a pet poodle. Child labor claims another life; Alice dies on the factory floor.
     Before the factory takes her down, Alice happily skips about a bit too much.
     But this is an important film—and yet another disclosure of material that made its way, in however transmuted a form, into Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).

LIGHTS IN THE DUSK (Aki Kaurismäki, 2006)

Concluding a trilogy begun with Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002), but in this case characterized by only ontological humor, Aki Kaurismäki’s quietly lovely, intense Laitakaupungin valot essays a nighttime security guard whose location sums up his existence: the nearby harbor, his loneliness and aspiration; the patch of businesses he guards, including a high-end jeweler’s, his reality: a constant reminder that Helsinki has more or less left him behind. Koistinen’s nemesis is a businessman who hates him for being a “loser” and targets him, in a complicated scheme of hoodwinking that involves a kept blonde femme fatale, to take the fall for the theft of the jewels that he engineers. This malicious individual is a cosmic force executing the unfairness of capitalism.
     Koistinen is the only character to appear in full; the businessman and the blonde lack depth, are various shades of colorlessness. A sign of some universal concern is a black boy who adopts an abused, abandoned dog and sympathetically watches over Koistinen. His eyes tell us he knows the score despite his youth. A woman who operates a coffee stand represents a possible future of assuaged loneliness for our hero. The film ends in a closeup of their joined hands.
     Kaurismäki’s most Bressonian film, with a touch of Dreyer and Cocteau besides, conjoins Koistinen’s immense loneliness with an accounting of silence punctuated by enhanced material sounds. Although he is kept from being a killer by his too-weak arm and knife, Koistinen reminded me of the young man at the center of Bresson’s L’argent (1983).
     A wonderful shot shows wind animating the ground, immediately followed, in prison, of our first glimpse of a sociable Koistinen.
     What courage and nobility are often called upon to keep hope alive!