Stromboli (1950)

This spring, I've watched quite a few Italian movies - let's continue on that track. Stromboli may not be Roberto Rossellini's most famous movie, but it is, for all its moments of terrible acting, a quite interesting one. Ingrid Bergman plays the leading role; a girl, Karen, with a complicated past, who, to escape a internment camp, marries an Italian man. The man lives on a small island, on the top of which broods an ever-active volcano. The differences between the spouses are apparent. The girl can't endure the simple life on the island. She feels trapped and lonely. One night, she goes to a woman's house, where she can get her dress fixed. The other woman, we learn, "is bad". And we soon see a gang of men serenading under her window. Among these men are Karen's husband. He drags her away and attacks her physically. This is not really a film dependent on plot. What Rossellini is trying to do is, I guess, to depict some clashes in terms of gender and class. It's a film about the significance of "a better life", and what it means to pursue it. The film is, in content and style, very subdued. With one, very unsurprising exception - the music. --- But there are several things about the film that made me uncomfortable. The image of the woman, too frail & self-occupied for the hard life, is a rotten one, but Rossellini seems to go along with it, developing it to tell a story about egoism, redemption and faith. The reason why Karen is so miserable is never really clarified. We are just to assume that she is too fond of fancy dresses and a comfortable life. The other important role in the film, that of her husband, is hardly more intelligible. He is bluntly naive, boyish - only to become brutal and violent. A cliché. A redeeming fact about the film is that the end has an openness to it, so that it can be interpreted in several ways. Stromboli is beautifully shot. The location, the desolate island, almost suffices for a reason for why this is still a good movie. In one early scene, we see Karin explore the village. She hears a distant cry of an instant. Karin's hestitant movements are central to understanding what kind of situation she has found herself in. That particular scene shimmers with life.