Italy
4*
Director:
Franco Brusati
Screenwriters:
Franco Brusati
Jaja Fiastri
Director of Photography:
Romano Albani
Running time: 101 minutes
Original title: Dimenticare Venezia
Quite extraordinary. Here is a film that reminded me of Bergman’s playful After the Rehearsal in its treatment of memories – nonchalantly inserting them into the physical fabric of the present – and yet it had the lush sexual undertones of a provocative Fellini. It deals primarily with the passing of time. But instead of it being a cause for anguish, it is a reason to reaffirm the happiness that life can provide. In typical Italian style, the film is warm and very human despite some melancholic themes, and it deals frankly with issues relevant to all of us.
The film starts with an opening credits sequence that at first seems wondrous and radiating childlike energy, as groups of children play in a forest with barely an adult in sight, while opera music bellows on the soundtrack, transporting us to a place of rapturous enchantment. One of the only adults around is Claudia, a girl in her late twenties, and toward the end of the sequence, she notices a young man and woman having sex in the distance. She sneaks a peek but makes sure the children don’t see the couple, and moves on.
One very short but infinitely clever moment is staged by director Franco Brusati: Three small girls sit at the base of a tree trunk lifting up their skirts ever so slightly. In front of each of them, going downhill, a shallow furrow has been dug out. When all is clear, and the signal has been given, the girls let loose to have their urine race against each other and make it to the end of the furrow in first place. It is a moment of sublime beauty and minimalism that will be visually referenced later in the film at a point that offers a stark contrast to the feel-good ambience of this youthful scene.
At a farmhouse in the Italian countryside, the middle-aged Anna (Mariangela Melato) is living with her partner, the young Claudia, and Anna’s late uncle’s widow, the aging opera singer Marta (Hella Petri). Marta is planning a trip with her family to Venice, and has invited her brother, Nicky (Erland Josephson), and his very handsome young boyfriend Picchio, along for a small family reunion.
Nicky and Marta have not seen each other in a long time, and Nicky’s arrival back home brings all sorts of beautiful memories, of his own sexual awakening and of the joy he saw on his sister’s face during childhood. One of these flashbacks depicts a birthday party (set to the sound of an Italian lullaby, Ambarabà ciccì coccò) that is straight out of an Ingmar Bergman film and is the highlight of the film, both blissful and soulful in its representation of a memory that underscores one of the film’s constant threads: the ineluctability of the passage of time.
But heavy as this theme is – and its effects are very visible, if not devastating, from a chance meeting with the much-older version of a young Rosino, who had once shared pornography with the young Nicky, to the brutal cut from a young birthday face to the same face at the gates of death – it is modulated by the theme of love that is subtly underscored by the different relationships, all of them gentle and understanding, and only once made explicit, in Marta’s impromptu performance of “L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Bizet’s opera Carmen during a lunch excursion in the forest.
Everyone is convinced times stands still for them, and they have such illusions because their memories haven’t faded, but once they are confronted with the visible effects of time, as Nicky is during his meeting with the old Rosino, can serve to thoroughly disabuse them of such ideas. In a late-night conversation with the gorgeous Picchio, during which Brusati shoots and lights him so as to cut a very angelic figure, strongly lit from above, Anna makes the same mistake of saying “Everything around us changes, grows, matures, dies, but we don’t.” She is wrong, but she still has a long way to go before such a realisation will dawn on her.
An unabashedly joyful celebration of life, To Forget Venice is nostalgic without being sentimental. The significance of time, and the healing power of the passage of time, is very quietly implied, but the film’s characters seem aware of it only obliquely. Nicky has come to be comfortable with himself, though he has lost his quirky boyhood looks, while Picchio is still beautiful but has not really become truly comfortable in his skin, or in his relationship with others. In one scene, before the very old maid Caterina enters his and Nicky’s room, he pushes the two beds apart “for Caterina’s sake”, while Nicky just looks at him, amused at the young man’s fear of being found out. It is a pity the director did not have the same level of comfort in presenting these relationships to us and there is barely any physical contact between the couples.
It is a pity this film is not more accessible (at this writing it is not available on DVD and even a VHS copy is near impossible to track down), but Erland Josephson’s presence, as in Bergman’s and Tarkovsky’s work, is a dependable sign the filmmaker chose to examine the finer parts of human existence with an eye and a paintbrush that few others possess. That filmmaker is Franco Brusati and with To Forget Venice he has created a very important film that deserves to be seen.