MY MOTHER’S SMILE (Marco Bellocchio, 2002)

Irene and Ernesto, an atheist, are separated. One day Leonardo, their little son who lives with his mother, is outside under the watchful eye of Irene, who is indoors. The child, distressed, is saying that he wants to be left alone. Irene attends to him, asking him what the problem is. Leonardo tells his mother that God is in his head, is everywhere in fact, and as a result he is never free—never free to think for himself! His mother smiles. And so do I. This is the launch of atheist Marco Bellocchio’s L’ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre (The Hour of Religion: My Mother’s Smile). The title refers to a time of faith, to be sure, but also to the weekly hour of religious instruction that Leonardo is currently being subjected to. Ernesto, a painter, has his own mother’s Mona Lisa-smile with which to contend. Thanks to his Monsignor-brother, their departed mother is currently under investigation for canonization! We Americans know what it means to have a mother who is a saint. It means you are Richard Nixon!* Ernesto is not Nixon—or a crook, or a hypocrite. He must make do, however, with what is going on around him.
     Most of us love our mothers. Ernesto didn’t love his. An insane brother—not the monsignor—murdered her, while she slept, he insists, while others recall instead she was awake and persevering against his blasphemies. The Vatican, which has kept the canonization process secret from him for three years, now is implicating Ernesto in it by soliciting his testomony. Thus is he drawn into a spiderweb of childhood memories, current reveries, familial nonsense and papal intrigues. Writer-director Bellocchio has fashioned here a curious satire that tests our limited, even distorted views of reality. In the meantime, one wonders what Leonardo will one day recall of his own mother.
     For me, this is one of Bellocchio’s least interesting films. A master may be coping with his own ambivalences, not to mention his anti-religious certainty, which is in danger of calcifying into a kind of faith. Bellocchio rarely proceeds as selfconsciously as he does here.

* In the U.S. there was once a President Nixon, who upon resigning in the face of his high crimes and misdemeanors publicly acknowledged what we all had privately suspected: his mother was a saint.

THE NAKED CITY (Jules Dassin, 1948)

Filmed on location in the Big Apple, Jules Dassin’s very moving black-and-white The Naked City is routinely categorized as a film noir. It is nothing of the sort. Most of it unfolds in daylight, there is no femme fatale, nor is there shadowy moral complexity (except that some criminals draw the line at murder), and the one whose dreams are crushed is the murder victim, a young blonde by the name of Jean Dexter. Her double identity—Dexter’s original name was Mary Batory—brushes past noirism, to be sure. But we never see Batory/Dexter except as a corpse. The character is essential to set the plot in motion but unimportant otherwise. Her reality is not a part of the film.
     Dassin’s film, which was written by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, from Wald’s story, is correctly described as a semi- or pseudo-documentary police procedural. It follows two detectives, Lt. Dan Muldoon and beginner Jimmy Halloran, as they routinely investigate Dexter’s murder. Lots of legwork!
     Some of the film’s best material is peripheral. His wife wants Halloran to take a strap to their son for disobeying a rule by crossing a dangerous street. Halloran won’t do it. Before the war there is little doubt that some counterpart of his would have measured up to this “unpleasant duty”; but hasn’t the world changed? His child’s independent streak hardly qualifies for so drastic a reprisal as corporal punishment. Halloran’s wife, who thinks she knows everything, calls her husband a coward. (In the line of duty, Halloran gets beaten up and shot at.) But as a representative of pre-war tradition, Halloran’s wife may be behind the times.
     Dassin’s filmmaking dazzles, but for me the film’s “star” is cutter Paul Weatherwax, who won an Oscar for his work here. He turns a good many of the best shots (gorgeously photographed by William Daniels, who was also Oscared) into inserts, and the result is a diamond-faceted portrait of the city and of city life.
     Producer Mark Hellinger memorably narrates: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”