Journey to Italy (1954)

So, Roberto Rosselini again! Journey to Italy is a considerably better film than Rome open city, which I reviewed some weeks ago. However, the story seems nothing out of the ordinary. Alex and his wife Catherine are travelling in Italy to sort out some inheritance business. Their relationship is bristling with negative tension and they both seem to be estranged from each other and the rest of the world. But where Rome open city felt strangely sloppy, this is a very integrated film. Most scenes take a surprising turn because the emphasis lies on unexpected things - a bustling crowd, a herd of intriguing museum statues, a herd of cows. In one of the scenes that made an impression on me, Alex, who is mostly a stone-faced man, is overwhelmed by a craving for a drink. He goes to the kitchen to ask for something, but the Italien maid does not understand him. Their lack of a common language expresses a sudden burst of energy in this otherwise quite elusive and hard-to-read man.
One impressive aspect of Rossellini's film is the way dialogue is employed. I realized how much "smart" dialogue can be used in a really stiff way, where every line is supposed to contribute to some complex Plot that you will understand if you think really hard. Here, dialogue is not used in order to convey information nor do the characters churn out witticisms for the audience to quote. Rossellini gives lots of space to ambiguity and in that he shows more interest in his characters than what I am used to seeing in most films. And he allows for repetition. Many seens bear a striking resemblance to each other - we see patterns, things happening again and again, variations - and it is from this that we learn to know the characters and the world they inhabit (or the world that they react to).