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 North Africa in WWII, has less to do with the war itself but a great deal to do with Italians at war.

 

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 Milan to Rome, Italian film director Mario Monicelli

talks about Italians at war.

 

Wanted in Rome

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 Libyan desert, smashing the unit's hitherto idyllic way of life. Mayhem follows. Italian wounded flood the camp, which is soon littered with corpses. There are ominous gun flashes on the horizon, the racket of battle.

 

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 Rome, speaking from a cell phone while on a train from Milan to Rome. "Because on the Piave the Italians showed their capacity for remedying the damage they do with all the idiocies and tomfoolery they get up to."

 

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 Libya, the only part of North Africa other European nations had not grabbed for themselves and thus free for Italy to colonise in a take-over that began in 1911.

 

But the Italian army always faced guerrilla resistance, until Libya's brutal so-called re-conquest by Mussolini in 1923, accomplished by troops backed up by airraids, chemical weapons, concentration camps. A third of the population of Cyrenaica was wiped out in the process, hence Colonel Gaddafi's periodic demands today for reparations.

Monicelli, what was Mussolini after in Africa?

 

"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 Viareggio, tells the tale, tellingly, without a trace of judgement, which is why those who laud him as the Ken Loach of Italy fall short of the mark. He gave birth to commedia all'italiana in 1958 with I Soliti Ignoti, the story of a perfectly planned bank robbery that goes wrong. Still another huge favourite today, once again with Sordi, is his witty Il Marchese del Grillo about a pranking 19th-century nobleman who finishes up cracking jokes about the then ruling papal government.

 

The train entered a tunnel, which killed our exchange.

 

 

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