De Sica was one of the great Italian directors of the neorealism era.
He directed one of my favourite films, Bicycle Thieves (1948), and the stunning and heartbreaking Umberto. D (1952) (some say the last true neorealism film). Both those films pull at the heartstrings, but De Sica knew when enough was enough and was never over-sentimental.
He directed The Roof in 1957. It contains many of the elements of neorealism. But it sits outside of the dates that most film historians and scholars agree that true neorealism exists. In The Roof, the main protagonists struggle to survive, struggle to get ahead.
It is a simple premise. A young married couple just trying to get not only find a house to live in but one that will afford them some privacy. They start off sharing a house with his parents, his younger sister and his elder sister, her husband and their family of several children. They share their bedroom with his parents and his younger sister. Eventually, their frustration leads to fighting and the decision to leave the house and strike out on their own.
Any houses or flats they find to rent or buy are little more than condemned premises due to fall down any day. And whilst the husband, Natale (Giorgio Listuzzi) works as an apprenticed bricklayer on large suburban house-building projects, they seem to get no closer to their wish for a home of their own. Until the wife Luisa (Gabriella Pallotta) meets a woman at a well and she tells Luisa that they could build a house next to hers on public land. But they had to do it in one night and had only 10 hours to do so - after the police stopped patrolling at night and before they started again in the morning. One requirement, it must have a roof before the police see it in the morning. If the dwelling had a roof no matter if there were no windows once the police came across it the next morning the occupants couldn't be evicted.
So they set about to build their own house, and they suffer setbacks, but also it helps rebuild torn relationships.
To today's viewer, the idea that you would or could build your own house on public land (as long as it had a roof etc.) just seems very strange, well it does to me. It's obvious that they do finally get their own house and their joy at their very basic house and considering the location they choose seems a little sad. But then you need to watch in context, it helps to understand the situation in Italy post-WWII. The number of displaced persons, the number of homeless people. So the house at least affords this young couple a roof, and security so they can build up from there.
That young couple and that little house represent much more than just the dreams of two people, a house of four walls and the roof we see. It represents a beginning, one which at the time Italy itself was going through after many years of fascist rule and then WWII. There was the beginning of a new optimism in Italy at the time, and this new optimism would lead to a new film framework, one with its roots in comedy, Commedia all'italiana.
Comments