Scandal in Sorrento
Also known as Bread, Love and…, released in 1955, starring Sophia Loren and Vittorio De Sica, formally directed by Dino Risi, and factually directed by De Sica. A piece for mass appeal, which begins with that eternally bankable pairing of characters, an old bachelor and his aged maid. The bachelor is Marshal Antonio Carotenuto (De Sica), charming and dumb and not totally post-fascist – a fact that no one seems to take especially seriously. Carotenuto is actually the thread tying together an entire quadrology of films, which includes the wonderfully named Bread, Love and Dreams; Bread, Love and Jealousy (titled Frisky for the US market!); and Bread, Love and Andalusia (set in Spain!). It’s not, on the surface, obvious what makes Carotenuto such an appealing subject. To take a wild guess, it might be that he represents a soothing transition away from the Mussolini years – Carotenuto maintains an affection for Il Duce, but is too silly for the audience to take that as an endorsement; yet he is good-hearted enough to make us feel that, after all, we must make allowances for such foibles. His first film appearance (the one with dreams in the title) is cited as the first instance of “pink” neorealism, aka neorealism that is not so realistic it hurts. Adding to this, the character is an energetic and clueless womanizer, and energetically and cluelessly pursued by women – he’s plot-in-a-box.
Here we find him returning to his childhood home in seaside Sorrento, which read to me as a sort of Italian equivalent to Texas, or Brooklyn – i.e. a place Italians think of as Italian. It is a land of tubby erotophobic priests, fresh seafood, cat fights, street harassment, blue sky and limpid water, tiny little glasses of wine at mid-day, balconies, gelato, and plaster. Carotenuto owns a home in town, but it has been leased to a young, widowed fishmonger, Donna Sofia (nicknamed a Smargiassa, “The Showoff”). Sofia is played by Sophia Loren, who had broken out (she had already broken out, but really broken out) a few films ago in the De Sica-directed The Gold of Naples, and whose contract for Scandal stipulated that De Sica direct all of her scenes. Carotenuto wants to move back in, Sofia wants to stay; he cools his heels lodging with a wealthy, high-strung woman of high virtue, who falls in love with him – but then he falls in love with Sofia, and she might be in love with a fisherman, and the fisherman is jealous of Carotenuto, and etc. As for Sofia’s feelings towards Carotenuto, they are blatantly real-estate oriented, but he has no qualms leveraging this for sexual advantage. The whole film is riddled with problematics. Carotenuto harasses Sofia, her fisherman lover slaps her (she slaps him back), and we probably wouldn’t want to know what Carotenuto was up to during the war. Sunshine is copious, morality a distant whisper of cloud.
The victims of this iniquity, at least those visible to us, do not however suffer overmuch. Loren famously failed her first camera test because the planes and angles of her face are so unusual (and thus difficult, it was thought, to keep in harmonious composition while filmed by a moving camera) – she looks like Superman if he were much cleverer. Here she is called on to be mostly impervious; by sloughing off the slings and arrows she makes the comedy anodyne. After pink neorealism would come Commedia all’italania, tart semi-fizzy films that focused on youth on the margins – Sofia’s class – and which could turn acid. But Sofia is not the focal point here. At the end of each day’s work we return with Carotenuto to his comfy featherbed, complacent. In about ten years you have to imagine he’ll be very bitter.
Dino Risi directed a lot of movies, pretty quickly, and did not present himself as a craftsman – see this excellent quote: “…the truth is that I believe I did many of my movies without being conscious of doing them. I was sitting by the camera, in my director’s chair, and I would say ‘Action’, ‘Let’s go!’ But I was thinking about something else. I was impatiently waiting to be done with the day’s work to be again alone with myself. I was thinking about everything but the film…about another story, other places, other actors. The film I was shooting was already metabolized, it was done, I could see it and it bored me. I could not linger on it any longer….” That seems comprehensive, and it’s probably fine to credit De Sica with Sorrento’s craft. It’s a proudly staid and well-joisted movie, in which the dialogue is skillfully jigsawed together – people speak rapidly and in sequence without the slightest overlap – and the town of Sorrento, shot on location and presumably completely ravishing, is displayed only as a function of the action of the plot. If we see a cobblestone street, it’s because a central character is walking down it, and they have someplace to go. Later in Il Sorpasso Risi, really directing this time, would languidly allow the camera to settle on whatever it settled on, in the process proving that Italy in 1962 looked pretty great, and also in the process making you suspect that anywhere, viewed with an equal languor of vision, would look pretty great. Whereas Scandal is tidy, even occasionally jewelbox – but not fussy, since that would be neurotic. Bourgeois is not a word I ever feel like I could put a pin into, but I’m pretty sure this is a bourgeois vision. What looks pretty great here is the featherbed.
NOTES
The details around Loren and De Sica are taken from Shawn Levy’s excellent Dolce Vita Confidential.
From what I gather this whole series of films was a huge success in Italy, and Scandal was seen as putting Sorrento on the map. Loren was given the keys to the city in 2009.
