Thursday,
December 21, 2006
Movie: "The Roses of the Desert " Mario Monicelli's
latest
The
ANNOTICO Report
"The
Roses of the Desert " which deals with the
Italian Troops in
He
harks back to his "La Grande Guerra" (1959), and they way the World
focuses more on Italy's stunning military defeat at Caporetto
in 1916, than to it's stunning recovery, and its final victory on the
river Piave a year later.
He
speaks about the Mindless soldiers of other countries, who do not bother to ask"What are we doing here?"
He
further states, that he and most Italians consider War an Abomination.
Further,
The Italians have less sense of nation. They've no fondness for glory or honour or sacrifice. For an Italian, a flag means nothing.
The Italian comes into his own when acting individually, defending his family,
his interests.
We're
not heroes or missionaries, but we do know how to live and people should let us
get on with it instead of always telling us how we should behave.
The Roses of the Desert
On a train journey from
talks about Italians at war.
Wanted in
December 20, 2006
British
planes swoop down out of a clear blue sky with utter surprise to strafe and
bomb an isolated Italian medical unit camped around an oasis in the
So
The Roses of the Desert (Le Rose del Deserto), the
65th and latest film of that giant of an Italian director, Mario Monicelli, now aged 91, nears its doom-laden, shattering
climax. In this film Monicelli brings us an affable
intellectual major (Stefano Strucci), forever writing
love-letters to his beautiful young wife, a down-to-earth Dominican friar
(Michele Placido) who brow-beats the unit into giving
medical treatment to Arab villagers in his care, a yelling Fascist general (Tatti Sanguinetti), all gut, who
orders the unit to scoop out a graveyard for Italians yet to die.
The
background to the film is first 1940, with Italian forces under General Rodolfo
Graziani swiftly pushing the British Eighth Army back
towards Egypt, then a year later, with the landing of Rommel in Africa, and
finally the Eighth Army's massive counter-attack. But the film, told with Monicelli's typical ironic detachment - dabbed with
dry humour and sentimentality - has little to do
with the war itself but a great deal to do with Italians at war. So does one of
Monicelli's greatest films, La Grande Guerra (1959),
featuring two artful layabouts played by Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman, who skive their way from Italy's stunning military
defeat at Caporetto in 1916 to its final victory on
the river Piave a year later.
Don't
shoot me!" Sordi cries out to the pair's
ice-cold Austrian captors. I'm afraid! I'm a coward! he
blubbers. He is executed all the same, as Gassman was
before him, because, heroic at last, they have both
refused to give away a military secret to the enemy.
Monicelli, for you is Caporetto
the mirror of the Italians, or Il Piave?
"Undoubtedly
the Piave," Monicelli
told Wanted in
Many
foreigners like to see a vein of cowardice in Italians at war. What do you
reply to that?
Monicelli, in his terse way, shot off his answers like
bullets. It's understandable. The Italians have no sense of nation.
They've
no feeling for glory or honour or sacrifice. For an
Italian, a flag means nothing. The Italian comes into his own when acting
individually, defending his family, his interests. We're not heroes or
missionaries, but we do know how to live and people should let us get on with
it instead of always telling us how we should behave.
Monicelli, pugnacious and hugely active still, was then
asked how he sees an Italian at war. He's a young man mobilised.
He doesn't know where he is or why he's there. Nobody explains anything to him.
He does what's asked of him but without knowing whether he's able to do it.
How
do you want audiences to react to The Roses?
I
hope they'll find it entertaining, perhaps be moved. Perhaps they'll feel a
little pity for the poor Italian soldier as well.
Based
on an autobiographical novel by a friend of the director, Mario Tobino, The Roses of the Desert is set in
But
the Italian army always faced guerrilla resistance, until
Monicelli, what was Mussolini after in
"Dividing the planet with Hitler without doing a
thing."
How
do you see war yourself?
"As an abomination. War should be banned by law. But that
doesn't mean I'm against all wars. There is such a thing as a just war. The second world war was one. We had to fight that. It was the
only way of getting rid of Hitler and fascism."
Then
a more familiar side of Monicelli came out, as he
spoke of the many non-professional actors in his film. "I don't know why
it is; but put any Italian into a uniform and he knows exactly what to do, just
as when women do when they dress as whores."
A
typical quip by a director known above all not for films on war, but as the
unsurpassed master of Italian-style comedy or commedia all'italiana,
where muted comedy often comes strongly laced with unspoken social satire or
tragedy, as in, for instance, Un borghese piccolo,
piccolo (1977), a terrible story of a bowing civil-servant (Sordi
again) who dotes on a son who at one point is accidentally killed by a stray
bullet in a bank robbery. The protagonist eventually finds his son's killer and
garrots him in front of his wife.
Bespectacled
Monicelli, a Tuscan from
The
train entered a tunnel, which killed our exchange.
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