Umberto D.
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| Umberto D. | |
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 DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Vittorio De Sica |
| Produced by | Giuseppe Amato Vittorio De Sica Angelo Rizzoli |
| Written by | Vittorio De Sica Cesare Zavattini Cesare Zavattini (story) |
| Starring | Carlo Battisti Maria-Pia Casilio Lina Gennari |
| Music by | Alessandro Cicognini |
| Cinematography | Aldo Graziati |
| Editing by | Eraldo Da Roma |
| Distributed by |  Dear Film Janus Films |
| Release date(s) | Jan 20, 1952 Nov 7, 1955 |
| Running time | 89 min |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Umberto D. is a 1952 Italian neorealistic film, directed by Vittorio de Sica. Most of the actors were non-professional including Carlo Battisti, who plays the title role.
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[edit] Plot
Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), an old man living in Rome, desperately tries to keep his apartment on a small state pension, but the landlady (Lina Gennari) attempts to drive him out to fit her social lifestyle. Umberto attempts to raise the lire to keep his room, but is unwilling to beg to his richer friends, and cannot be helped by his only true friends, a pregnant maid (Maria-Pia Casilio) and his dog, Flike.
The film begins with a march of elderly men for the raising of pensions which is quickly stopped by the police because the men had no permit to march. The crowd files out of the square, still muttering their protests, with the camera eventually focusing in on one of the marchers, Umberto D. Ferrari. He returns to his apartment, only for the landlady to threaten to kick him out at the end of the month, assuming he will not pay her fifteen thousand lire. Umberto goes out to sell his watch and some books in desperate attempts to raise the money, but can only hope to appease the landlady with half the funds required. These efforts to appease the landlady are sent through the housemaid, who is clearly sympathetic to Umberto, and reveals to him that she is pregnant, which will likely get her kicked out as well. The maid tells Umberto about her relationships with two soldiers, and how they are both abandoning her in her pregnancy. She and Umberto become friends through this mutual trust.
Umberto calls for doctors to take him to a hospital in an attempt to escape paying rent, and the maid is given care of Umberto's dog while he is away. The hospital eventually forces him to leave, with Umberto coming back to the apartment during extensive renovation. The landlady is changing and decorating the house to accomodate her fiancé, a cinema owner, and future social gatherings. This renovation generally causes a mess in Umberto's room and sends the message that the landlady no longer plans to house him. Umberto contemplates suicide by jumping out the window unil discouraged by the image of his dog asleep on the bed.
Umberto then leaves the apartment after saying goodbye to the maid, and attempts to find a place for his dog to stay before finding where he himself will live. Umberto attempts to leave Flike with a couple who house over twenty dogs, then a little girl that he knows, then appears to be about to throw himself onto a passing train as the dog escapes his grip and runs away from Umberto, essentially saving his owner's life. Umberto chases the dog down then slowly entices him with a pinecone, getting the dog to play with him and trust him once more, and the film ends with Umberto and the dog playing off into the distance.
[edit] Analysis
One may read in Umberto D. a sense of the moment of Italian neorealism ending. This film is both a celebration of that moment and a lamentation of its death, suggests Millicent Marcus. There is a dialectic of generational compositions which in the opening film of neorealism - commonly accepted as Rome, Open City - there is a parade of boys marching on Rome to reclaim the future -perhaps itself a reference to Mussolini's march on Rome. By comparison Umberto D. opens with coverage of a march by pensioners trying to improve their plight for they have been left in poverty in post-war Italy as inflation starts to rise. The film bears witness to the failure of social change and the hoped for solidarity of early neorealism to happen. Rather than being a society welded together around notions of social solidarity Umberto D. can be read as being about a society at war with itself.
Paul Ginsborg's analysis of Italy notes that the post-fascist purification process Epurazione was largely a failure. The judiciary had remained largely untouched and even by 1960 62 out of 64 prefects (the government representatives in the provinces), had previously been fascist functionaries. In the film the response of the authorities to the marchers seems to hark back to an authoritarianism based upon legalistic niceties rather than morals as the march is broken up because they didn't ask permission to march.
Rather than solidarity the representation of old men marginalized to a soup kitchen - perhaps all tyrannized by an aspirant nouveau riche landlady in the same way as Umberto is - shows a lack of intra-generational solidarity between the old men when they are blamed for not getting a permit to march. In the meantime the landlady's social class has forgotten about the war like much of the cinema-going public. The film can in some sense be seen as a surrender by de Sica to the isolation of the human condition and the impossibility of true social solidarity. The public reception of the film itself was negative and the film was a financial failure. This in itself contributed to the difficulty of raising funds for further neorealist productions. Marcus (1986) suggests that it wasn't just external changes which contributed to the failure of the film in the box office but the nature of the film itself.
Umberto D. can be seen as having moved further towards Cesare Zavattini's purer version of neorealism in which a film was to be as devoid as possible of dramatic superstructure, rather it should aim to dignify human existence by idealizing any given moment of a human being's everyday existence, thus illustrating how striking that moment actually is. De Sica set out to make a film that was an uncompromising attempt to perfect this aesthetic aim. Zavattini once again collaborated with him on the script and they deliberately chose a subject that would have little immediate audience appeal. In Umberto D. the old man is represented as closed and hostile to the outside world in ways specifically designed not to gain sympathy from the audience.
The film nevertheless stitches together moments taken from the everyday to give a shape to Umberto's experience of reality. Added to this there is a clear chronicling of the events in Maria's life as she ends up pregnant and deserted, alongside the landlady who has an imminent marriage as she aims to clamber up the social scales. The film however de-dramatizes events such as Maria's announcement of her pregnancy.
The film also features a pair of middle-class lovers who get to use Umberto's room for their adulterous sex. They are portrayed in an almost melodramatic way as Marcus humorously notes, "It is as if a scene from another film found its way by mistake into Umberto D., serving in its incongruity, as a foil for de Sica's resolutely undramatic storytelling mode." (Marcus: 1986: p 105).
Not only does the ethic of social solidarity begin to break down during the film but the stylistic mode of neorealism itself undergoes a change. The zoom down to the street indicating the subjective desire of Umberto at that moment to finish it all, the shot of the fierce bulldog at the kennels presenting a subjective perspective - perhaps for Flike, the old man's dog - on the rest home as a mirror image of the snapping landlady moves the viewer away from the more neutral cinematic practices central to classic neorealism. Marcus extends this analysis noting that there are a number of different perspectives developed about Umberto during the film. At times he appears in a humorous light at other times pathetic whilst receiving critical treatment at other times.
Many of the shots create a mise-en-scene to internalize the characters. The way Umberto is shot in his room is not done in a voyeuristic way, rather it pulls the spectator into the mindset of the character. A similar process is taking place in Maria's personal space in the kitchen. On one occasion she sees a cat wandering across roofs acting as a visual synecdoche for her own feelings of potential homelessness.
As a character Umberto is a self-absorbed old man. At the kennels he has no sympathy for another dog owner who cannot afford to get his dog out and who knows the dog will be put down. Neither has Umberto any recognition that Maria has been abandoned. In the film poverty combines with pride resulting in total self-absorption. Rather than helping to forge solidarity poverty is represented as dividing people. Marcus challenges what she saw as a consensus critical perspective that the film does offer hope in the end when Umberto plays with the dog. By comparison Marcus likens it to an hysterical moment of forgetting the constraints of a grinding everyday existence. She argues that there is a replacement of the human reconciliation between father and son which comes at the end of Bicycle Thieves. Hope of reconciliation in Umberto D. is negated by substituting with a dog precisely because it is non-human.
Marcus ends by suggesting that it is in the visual style of the film rather than its personal/political implications that a corrective is offered against the processes of atomization and solitude within the modernizing social order. Marcus compares the didacticism of Roberto Rossellini's screenplay for Rome, Open City, arguing that Umberto D. must be viewed in its entirety before any message can be deciphered. This provides evidence that the neorealist moment of Rome, Open City is past. By comparison she suggests that Umberto D. opens the door to the style about to be pioneered by Fellini and Antonioni and that narrative has been shifted to form as an agent of social change, "By making the form the new repository of neorealist meaning, de Sica and Zavattini put an end to the classical neorealism of content, and rendered possible instead Fellini's, Antonioni's and Visconti's application of its stylistic precepts to subjects hitherto excluded from serious postwar cinematic treatment."
[edit] Awards
- (1957) Cesare Zavattini Nominated for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story Academy Award
- (1957) Vittorio De Sica Nominated for the Grand Prix - Cannes film festival
[edit] Trivia
Umberto D is an influence for Paul Mazursky's film Harry and Tonto, in which the dog is substituted for a cat, as well as Jonathan Blitstein's 2007 indie film Let Them Chirp Awhile which takes place in New York City.
[edit] References
See Literature under Cinema of Italy
[edit] External links
- Umberto D. at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Stuart Klawans
- Alternative Film Guide Review of DVD
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