Paisan, written by Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and five others - Nine out of 10

Paisan, written by Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and five others

Nine out of 10

This emotional, beautiful, dramatic motion picture has been included on The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies ever Made list:

https://www.listchallenges.com/new-york-times-best-1000-movies-ever-made/list/17

Paisan presents a collection of stories that has had an impact on Martin Scorsese, among others, who speaks about it in a documentary called American Cinema – he mentions this and quite a few other Italian classics.

When the Allies, mainly the Americans and the British land in Sicily, during World War II, they need the help of locals to find their way and avoid traps – the remaining German troops, mines and other nasty surprises.

Carmela is the girl that would try to show such a group the way, but in the process, it seems at one point that the soldier she is left with might try to harass her or even worse, as they struggle to communicate, without really understanding what the other says in his or her respective language…we could say that the girl dies with a spoiler alert, for this happens in the first fifteen minutes of the film, albeit this is the end of the first story.

The next episode so to say has an Italian boy of only six or thereabouts walk with an African American soldier that is drunk, through the streets of the city, walking into a puppet show, where the drunk G.I. is interfering with the performance, probably under the impression, in his inebriated state, that he has to interfere to correct a wrong that was taking place, no matter that it was not happening in real life and it was just fiction.

The boy warns the American soldier not to fall asleep, for when that happens nevertheless, he takes his boots and then the two meet again, just as the now sober MP drives a car, he sees a boy in the process of trying to get something off a truck and he stops and takes him to task.

The American is upset and then tries to get his boots back and when he gets a pair, he sees that they do not fit and thus he insists he is taken to the home of the boy, who keeps insisting he has none, in a conversation that is plagued by the same problem as in the first story of trying to get the meaning across the language barrier, for they do not speak the same tongue.

However, the American understands finally that the boy has no family, his mother and father have died in a bombardment – making the noise boom, boom a few times does the trick of conveying his tragic status – and when he finally sees that the boy lives in squalor, together with many other people that had lost everything in the devastating conflict, he abandons the boots and forgets about his previous threats that the boy would pay for his theft.

The next segment has the traditional subject of the prostitute at its core, or the sex worker as the politically correct wording of the day would have it, and we learn the reason behind her involvement in the profession – which is increasingly associated with abuse by males in the world of today, where the Nordic countries consider it a crime and punish the men involved in it, considering for good reason the women to be the victims.

Francesca had fallen in love and it now seems pointless, for her lover would never return, and this is surely one of the main reasons why women become ‘sex workers’, along with financial distress, for in World War II, in many places there was nothing to eat and no way to survive unless one engaged in desperate activities, as we have read in the sublime, classic Catch 22, of which this segment reminds viewers, at least the under signed.

Two other segments seem more like the traditional war stories, where protagonists are involved in fierce battle with the Nazis, in one this happens as one man and a woman try to reunite with the family and lover respectively, crossing into territory still controlled by the enemy.

In the other, last story of the film, heavy fire exchanges take place next to the river Po, on which the loathsome fascist have thrown the body of a resistance fighter, with the sign Partigiano, so that others see it and run afraid that something similar might happen to them, but one other partisan risks his life by taking the boat to recuperate the corpse of his comrade, which is eventually buried…or at least covered with sand, which seemed to be the case – I was wondering why they did not dig a hole, but then these were extremely dangerous conditions.

Perhaps even more interesting and counterintuitively funny, sophisticated, intellectual is the story of the three vising chaplains, who bring food to a monastery of Italian monks, that had helped the locals, offered a refuge for their animals among others, but show a rather annoying obtusity in the face of visitors who have another faith.

They are hospitable, pleasant, up to the point when they learn that two of the visiting men are not Catholic, one is a Protestant and the other a Jew and once they learn this, they start a polemic and endeavor to ‘bring them on the right path’, asking the Catholic American clergy if he had not tried to show them the light, question what they see is their error, only to find that the American does not see the issue in their terms, he knows that they are convinced they are on the right path and then the local monks try fasting…to see that the visitors correct their religious error.

Paisan is a classic.