Review: Rome, Open City

In 1945 Italy was in the grip of war, finding itself to be a deadly front between Allied attempts to defeat the Fascists. It was in this climate that Roberto Rossellini, one of the country's most celebrated filmmakers, shot Rome, Open City. The BFI have recently restored the first true example of Italian Neo-Realism and are showing it in an extended run.

With the national film industry having been comprehensively destroyed (they had more pressing issues to concern themselves with), such a project was ambitious. Rossellini initially began shooting a documentary in 1944 about Don Morosini, a martyred priest who helped the Resistance, thanks to the funding of a rich old lady. Various other funds were scrimped and the film evolved into a feature length narrative. Thus the movie has the look not of a polished production but an amateur newsreel - footage was taken mere months after the Nazis had jackbooted around the Eternal City. Locations were real, set in the crumbling courtyards and Fascist apartment blocks where partisans really did hide out. The extras were real people, skinny and weary and struggling, adding an authenticity that studios blow huge budgets striving to achieve. Discarded US Army film stock had to be salvaged for use. In my mind, though, the shoddy production does not detract from enjoying Rome, Open City because we are watching a piece of history. Rossellini's masterpiece takes us into the period better than any recreation could, and that is surely one of the central aims of cinema.

This documentary realism did not stop with Rome, Open City. Inspired by the guerrilla attitude to filmmaking, other Italians learnt from Rossellini. Polished aesthetics were shunned in favour of capturing life. Issues important to normal people were told. Locations, non-professional actors and the downtrodden became fashionable. The camera was used to observe stories of everyday life. Thus Italian Neo-Realism was born, a genre which impacted film profoundly.

It is not simply the style which makes Rome, Open City worth seeing. The story focuses on Francesco and Giorgio, two Communist resistance fighters, who are being hunted by the ruthless pantomime villain Gestapo officer. Francesco's fiancee, Pina, struggles to get by with her son, Marcello, a spirited young scamp who plants bombs with the other neighbourhood kids. Don Pietro, the local priest, uses his position to help the anti-Nazi fighters. Pina's sister is not so moral. Along with a friend, she fraternises with the Germans and acts as an informant in exchange for money. The ghost of poverty was a frightening reality for Italians at the time. So things go wrong, arrests are made, and people are killed. Without giving too much away, several deaths and scenes of torture are as harrowing and depressing today as they must have been in 1945. The brilliant acting completes the documentary realism of the production.

While the German antagonists are rather two-dimensional and cliched, the rest of life in occupied Rome is laid out with a startling proximity. If the aim was to seem as if a camera had been stuck in a street and left there, then Rossellini succeeded.