Flirtations with Italian cinema history

As we've made our first real exploration of Italy -- I'd been here in 1994, but only in the far north to go skiing, and this is my wife's first time setting foot in the country -- we've expected to become reacquainted with our impression of Italy from the movies. 

In Venice, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was invoked multiple times. As I'm writing this, we have not yet been to Rome, but we're already talking about a visit to the Trevi Fountain, because that's where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita. (I had been saying it was Brigitte Bardot. Oops.) Perhaps more relevant to me personally, I will be on the lookout for scenes from Roman Holiday.  

What we were not expecting was what we found in the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, where we spent Tuesday night, chosen only for its relative equidistance between Venice and Rome. 

The town has the old buildings and piazzas to make it sort of the platonic ideal of a "small" Italian town. Small by the standards of Venice and Rome, anyway.

That must have been just what the producers of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful thought, which is why they chose to shoot the opening section of the film here.

Throughout the town you see little plaques like the one I've included above. I should say, we saw three of them. I assume there are only as many plaques as there are Arezzo locations that are recognizeable from the film. I recognized these specific locations only in the vaguest sense, having rewatched the movie as recently as five years ago, but still not having the familiarity necessary for full recall. 

However, the idea of the Italian piazza -- in movies ranging from Suspiria to Cinema Paradiso to the aforementioned films of Federico Fellini -- has been fully established for us, meaning the familiarity feels strong.

And then we discovered the view. 

We ascended to what we thought was Arezzo's highest point to look at a medieval cathedral, and then noticed the park beyond that. Which -- very casually, it seem to us -- had this view:

I know this doesn't even really convey it, but it's the best I've got without including members of my family.

So at this point I inevitably thought of a different sort of film set in Italy, the sun-drenched romantic films such as Under the Tuscan Sun, if you want a movie I haven't actually seen, or La Dolce Villa, not to be confused with La Dolce Vita, which I saw earlier this year, if you want films I have seen. And though I can't name them at the moment, I've seen a lot of films like this, travelogues with a lot of food porn at their center. 

So I guess I am reaching the following not very interesting point: I've seen a lot of depictions of Italy on film, and being in Italy proves that these films were actually shot on location?

Two other quick general thoughts about Italy in terms of its role in film:

1) When we were making our way through the rabbit warren of Venetian streets, I found myself wondering where they showed the films in the Venice Film Festival. There was not a single place I saw that I recognized as a likely, or even potential, screening area.

2) In Arezzo I ended up wearing my "The Good, The Bad and The Wookie (sic)" shirt, which you can see below, which I thought was appropriate as it invokes spaghetti western master and revered Italian director Sergio Leone.

Oh and here's another panorama image of Arezzo, just because:

Audient Classics: Roman Holiday

This is the second in my 2023 monthly series watching classic movies I loved but have seen only once.

I chose Roman Holiday for February in conjunction with Valentine's Day, but I should have questioned the wisdom of that when it was 10 o'clock on Tuesday night and I hadn't yet started it.

My first port of call was to have my wife watch it with me -- it being the holiday that celebrates romance and all -- but it's hard to pin her down to watch any movies these days, let alone a 70-year-old one that she's probably already seen more than once. (I've only seen it once, hence its inclusion in this series.)

When she didn't want to, I was thinking of watching it Wednesday, in conjunction with American Valentine's Day.

But then it turned out that we decided not to do anything for Valentine's Day at all. Our lives have been busier than we can handle lately, and her birthday is this weekend, so February 14th doesn't have much of a presence in our household even in a year when we're less busy. When we decided to treat it as a normal night rather than faking it, it was actually a huge relief.

But that meant that once we had had a cocktail and started our newest puzzle -- which I guess means we were, sort of, celebrating it -- I did have time to watch the movie, after we were all cocktailed and puzzled out.

Whether I should have started a nearly two-hour movie after 10 p.m., when I'd already had cocktails, if I wanted to fully appreciate it, is another matter. Welcome to my last week of movie decisions.

Although I was never bored, I did find the movie a bit slow, as in, it seemed like relatively little was happening to fill a whole two hours. It takes nearly the whole first hour for Gregory Peck's Joe Bradley and Audrey Hepburn's Princess Anne to even finish up their first night together.

Now, that makes a certain sense as the whole movie covers only about 48 hours in these characters' lives. And I didn't make this observation out of boredom, as suggested previously. I was just amazed that William Wyler's film had been entertaining me relatively well on so relatively little for so relatively long.

I'm not sure if any movie can keep me from falling asleep on my couch nowadays, as lately I'm too tired to watch basically any movie uninterrupted. So yes, I did fall asleep a couple times (always and forever pausing when I do this) and didn't finish until 1 a.m.

Basically I was very charmed by the movie, but I didn't swoon for it like I did the first time. You wouldn't recall this, I'm sure, but I included it as one of five movies I would watch on a blimp in this post, based on a silly ad they were playing at MIFF, and I chose it specifically for its swoony romantic qualities. Those registered this time but they didn't overwhelm me or anything.

I was, as I always am, reminded of how much I like Peck as a romantic lead, and how darling Aubrey Hepburn was in the right role. (Unfortunately, the role that is probably her most iconic, Holly Golightly, also appears in a movie remembered for its awfully racist impersonation of a Japanese man by Mickey Rooney.) There's a lightness to this movie, even at the times it feels slow, and Eddie Albert makes the perfect third wheel for part of their adventures, playing the cameraman who secretly snaps all the shots of Princess Anne on her "day off."

Shots that he turns over to her at the end, unpublished. The ending of Roman Holiday certainly makes use of conventional Hollywood narrative arcs, as Joe Bradley stops short of his betrayal of Anne, reforming himself before it's too late in a fairly standard case of character redemption. But Dalton Trumbo's script doesn't insult our intelligence by having Anne drop everything and run off with a reporter who has been interacting with her on false pretenses. They had a lovely adventure together but they both have real lives to return to, and hers is just a little bit sad, since we know its many routines and proprieties are suffocating to her. We hope, of course, that a taste of freedom might mean she can learn how to incorporate similar adventures into her future, so that her whole life feels a bit less stultifying. And I suppose if you are a true romantic, you might believe that even she and Joe may find each other again, outside of the bright heat of the spotlight.

The sort of romantic who comes out on Valentine's Day, and watches a romantic movie on February 14th even if it kills him.