You can't do better than ''Umberto D.''

When Neo-Realism Collided With Reality
By PETER BRUNETTE, New York Times

WHEN Vittorio De Sica's relentless dissection of postwar Italian society, ''Umberto D.,'' appeared in 1952, he was accused by the government's minister of entertainment of ''washing Italy's dirty linen in public.'' The open letter, published in a newspaper, hinted strongly that Italian filmmakers should henceforth be more upbeat -- especially if they wanted to continue receiving government subsidies.

The letter effectively put an end to the glorious movement known as Italian neo-realism, with its emphasis on the use of real locations and nonprofessional actors and its rejection of any hint of cinematic glamour. And it was delivered at the very moment the movement had achieved perhaps its purest expression, with ''Umberto.''

Less well-known than Roberto Rossellini's ''Open City'' (1945), which began the movement, or De Sica's 1948 masterpiece, ''Bicycle Thief,'' ''Umberto D.'' was overdue for revival. And now, expertly restored, it is playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, exemplifying a movement that has had an immeasurable impact on the last 50 years of filmmaking around the world.

As in most neo-realist films, the plot of ''Umberto D.'' is resolutely unadorned. Umberto D. Ferrari, a retired bureaucrat who can't survive on his meager pension, battles with an unfeeling landlady to keep his rented room. One by one, former colleagues and insensitive social institutions fail him, until his only emotional connections in the world are with his dog and with the landlady's uneducated and unmarried maid, who is pregnant and herself desperately in need of assistance. Unfortunately, Umberto, obsessed with keeping up appearances, is not always able to provide it. He ultimately considers suicide, but the film ends on a hopeful note that may be little more than wish-fulfillment on the part of filmmaker and audience.

Cesare Zavattini, De Sica's scriptwriter and the major theorist of neo-realism, wrote both ''Bicycle Thief'' and ''Umberto D.'' and was intent on carrying out his theories more fully in the second film. For this hyper-realist, the truest cinematic expression was one fully congruent with lived time -- a 90-minute movie would portray 90 minutes of a person's life -- and, it goes without saying, would focus solely on the small details of everyday reality. De Sica was in fact able to achieve five full minutes of this hopelessly idealistic but hardly ignoble goal during a famous and powerful scene, about 30 minutes into the movie, in which the camera follows the maid around the kitchen as she prepares breakfast. In the midst of her wordless preparations, she pats her pregnant belly and tears stream down her face. It is one of cinema's most sublime sequences.

Beginning with a demonstration by pensioners against the government, ''Umberto D.'' leads the viewer to expect a political analysis of its protagonist's desperate situation, but it quickly becomes clear that De Sica isn't really interested in pursuing that idea. Though the bourgeois landlady and the fatuous friends in her music circle come in for some well-deserved drubbing -- the landlady hypocritically rents out Umberto's room by the hour to illicit lovers -- De Sica is quoted in Roy Armes's book ''Patterns of Realism'' insisting that politics are not the point: ''It is not Umberto's economic condition that interests us, it is his moral and human relationships with society. What concerns us is the solitude of an old man.'' To the continual consternation of the Communist party, which was then highly influential in artistic circles, most neo-realist films tended to see their characters' problems as a result of failings in human nature rather than as a function of capitalism. ''Umberto D.'' was no exception.

The film is composed primarily of vignettes and tiny, telling scenes filled with expressive human gestures that have little in common with the grand sweep of Hollywood narrative. Though common enough now, this procedure was, at the time, rather unorthodox, even in neo-realism. In fact, the most fascinating thing about ''Umberto D.'' today is that so much of it is so wonderfully silent, relying, for once, on the pictures to tell the story. Many of the film's most memorable moments owe an obvious debt to the visual dexterity of Charlie Chaplin's best scenes, as when Umberto, who has been practicing begging, suddenly turns his hand over, as though checking for rain, when a passerby makes a move to give him some money.

Much of the film's business is taken up with Umberto's adorable dog, and, like Chaplin's films, ''Umberto D.'' constantly flirts with sentimentality. To counter this, De Sica makes Umberto more than a little irascible and selfish, and any ''cute'' moments with the dog are always revelations of Umberto's inner psychological state rather than simply indulged for their own sake. The strategy seems to have worked. In his recent magisterial documentary on Italian cinema, ''My Voyage to Italy'' (''Il Mio Viaggio in Italia''), no less an authority than Martin Scorsese, who admits to preferring ''Umberto D.'' to ''Bicycle Thief,'' says: ''There's nothing easy about 'Umberto D.' The emotions are never forced, and the pathos is always genuine.''

The film's visual style also contributes to the storytelling. Virtually all of ''Umberto D.'' is shot in elaborate deep-focus, a technique popularized by Orson Welles some 10 years earlier in ''Citizen Kane.'' By emphasizing the physical space in the foreground, the camera reveals the vastness of Umberto's social isolation. Furthermore, the characters move among the Roman statuary and monuments, always in focus, giving us a sense that what is happening to Umberto has its roots in the human condition that stretches back centuries.

Umberto is played by a nonprofessional actor, a professor from Florence named Carlo Battisti whom, legend has it, De Sica stopped one day on the street. It's no accident that his character, Umberto D., has the same name as the director's father, an impoverished bank clerk and insurance company employee. The film is dedicated to De Sica's father because, as De Sica said later, ''He himself was an old bourgeois who fought against poverty and to maintain his dignity.''

While the subtitles are occasionally inexact or anachronistic, and seem, unfortunately, not to have been retranslated for the restoration, the visual and sound tracks are superb. The restoration was undertaken under the guidance of Giuseppe Rotunno, the famous cinematographer of Fellini and Visconti, and by the nonagenarian film stock expert Vincenzo Verzini, who has worked on many of the classics of Italian cinema, including Antonioni's ''Notte'' and Fellini's ''Dolce Vita'' and who has in recent years restored a great many of the films he helped to make years ago. Damaged or missing frames in the original negative of ''Umberto D.'' were replaced, the splicing between reels upgraded and the lighting improved. The soundtrack was also restored by transferring it to digital audio tape and filtering it with modern equipment.

Zavattini's hope of making a feature-length commercial film that would constitute a real and raw ''slice of life'' was never to be realized, of course, and perhaps that's as it should be. For a sense of what this impossible dream might have looked like, though, you can't do better than ''Umberto D.''

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/movies/film-when-neo-realism-collided-with-reality.html?pagewanted=1