The conclusion of his “young love” trilogy, Due soldi di speranza found writer-director Renato Castellani sharing the top prize at Cannes with Orson Welles’s Othello. (Ettore Maria Margadonna and Titina De Filippo collaborated with him on the film’s story and screenplay.) Italy’s critics named Castellani the year’s best filmmaker while also adjudging the script that he co-wrote the year’s best. On the strength of this film came his next assignment, another film about young love: Romeo and Juliet (1954), which won Castellani the top prize at Venice—a film, although seriously flawed, far superior to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.
Due soldi di speranza is a zany comedy that, initially, unfolds in an impoverished village setting at hilarious breakneck speed but resolves its emotionally complex material in a more problematic key. Twenty-two year-old Antonio, just out of the army, manages one lousy job after another (one of these involves the brutal treatment of carriage-drawing horses as they are forced to negotiate an uphill bit of street—animal lovers, beware); meanwhile, although her father and brother are against him, Antonio also increasingly reciprocates the romantic attentions of Carmela, whose unswerving devotion to Antonio, delightful, is reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn’s pursuit of Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938). Thus Antonio must try to balance the claims being made on him by personal feelings and social responsibility, including his need to contribute to the household of his almost always hysterical mother (Filomena Russo, fabulous).
Brash and brilliant, but also heartfelt and affectionate, Castellani’s film represents a less familiar kind of Italian neorealism. Suggesting a postwar society that doesn’t quite know whether life now is better understood as a comedy or a tragedy, it merits its accolades.
Vincenzo Musolino plays Antonio; Maria Fiore, Carmela.
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PORTRAIT OF A BEAUTY (Jeon Yun-su, 2008)
July 11, 2012A young child, prohibited from royal court painting because she is a girl in the eighteenth century, substitutes her accomplished work for her brother’s inept work to protect him; but his disastrous showing at an official performance, which drives him to commit suicide, requires that she “become” him to save the family honor. Spurred by her guilt-inducing father, she persists in this impossible deception even with the advent of puberty.
This ridiculous narrative springboard launches, from South Korea, Jeon Yun-su’s sweeping, tragic romantic melodrama Mi-in-do, based on Kee Jung-myeong’s fictional account (with the gender-switch fabrication) of erotic folk painter Shin Yoon-bok (a.k.a. Hwawon), Baramui Hwawon. Under her assumed identity of Yoon-bok, Yun-jeong attracts various sexual attentions, including those of two men who come to know her actual identity: a young thief, whose passionate love she reciprocates, and her mentor. Meanwhile, her own experiences shift the focus of her traditional art to a scandalous emphasis on the female body and female beauty.
I never believed Yoon-jeong’s supposedly convincing routine of “wrapping” down her breasts; but what is a man who is really a woman supposed to do? This voluptuous film engrosses and entrances, and fairly well bleeds dry the wayward heart. It is also dreamily photographed in gorgeous, silken colors, especially at dusk and at night. The cinematographer, whose work I have adjudged to be the best of 2008, is Park Hee-Joo.
Saturated with romantic anguish and exceptional cruelty, the film may not be to everyone’s taste, especially since the gender masquerade is devoid of Shakespearean wit; but it is all so beautiful to the eye, and hauntingly melancholy, that others will find it impossible to resist. I fought liking it as best I could but, mesmerized, gave in to my feminine side and (I think) loved it. Perhaps I should find some other way of expressing this.
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