Neo-realism and Fellinian baroque
After the war, Cinecittà was used as a refugee center, forcing Rosselini to shoot Rome, Open City (1945) on location, in a city still devastated by bombing. This film, dedicated to the Roman resistance during the Nazi occupation, is the birthplace of Italian neo-realism: natural settings and non-professional actors are used to evoke the destiny of ordinary people. Such is the case of the famous Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1949), a desperate and gloomy odyssey through the city's suburbs to the bicycle market of Porta Portese, which still exists today. Umberto D, by the same director (1952), drives the point home, not without a certain amount of sentimentality, with its character of a retired professor who is forced to beg on the outskirts of the Pantheon. The austerity of the post-war years gave way to the Italian "economic miracle", while Cinecittà was back on its feet, thanks in particular to the success of Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), in which Audrey Hepburn, in the role of a young visiting princess, allows herself, in defiance of convention, a day of freedom in the Eternal City. The film inscribed a number of iconic images in the collective memory: a Vespa ride, views of the Colosseum and Castel Sant'Angelo, a visit to the Bocca della Verità... A postcard cinema was born, perpetuated the following year, but in color this time, by La Fontaine de l'amour (Jean Negulesco, 1954), an obvious reference to the Trevi Fountain. Amours à l'italienne (Delmer Daves, 1962), in the same vein, is also worth a look, and not just for its flamboyant technicolor. A Roman by adoption like Fellini, whose films never cease to declare his love for the Eternal City, finds it hard to escape these postcard visions, even helping to make some of its most famous monuments even more iconic. Such is the case, of course, of the Trevi Fountain, where Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni take a midnight dip in La Dolce vita (1960). With Fellini, the great illusionist, two Rome's intermingle until they merge: the real Rome, and the fantasized one he recreates in the immense Cinecittà studios. Such is the case of Via Veneto in La Dolce vita, a haven for the fashionable and fashionable Rome of the time. Ten years earlier, the film seems to herald the end of a party that would give way to the leaden years at the dawn of the 1970s. Fellini showed the same penchant for decadence in Roma (1972), a succession of anthology scenes and a kaleidoscopic portrait of the city, its folklore and its - many - contradictions. Street banquets are noisily organized alongside the parade of a decrepit Catholicism still bent on splendor, Dantesque traffic jams are shown, the city's archaeological treasures are suggested, but the lightness and tired elegance of La Dolce vita seem to have dissipated somewhat.
Between carelessness and pessimism
In the meantime, Italian cinema has enjoyed a golden age, with foreign blockbusters, most of them American, flocking to the Italian capital's studios to shoot peplums and other blockbusters, while Italian comedy offers an acerbic chronicle of the Italian realities of the time: machismo and consumerism are ridiculed with rare ferocity. The genre's greatest successes, such as Il Giovedì (Dino Risi, 1964), are not devoid of tenderness. This one-day reunion of an irresponsible father and his son, whom he hasn't seen in five years, is well worth rediscovering, and gives a glimpse of what life was like in Rome at the time, with its cafés, wastelands and nearby beaches for lounging. In L'Eclipse (1962), Antonioni uses the E.U.R. district (Esposizione Universale di Roma, a southern suburb of Rome with classically inspired fascist architecture) to explore the neuroses and existential anxieties of modern Italy, as well as its eternal theme of incommunicability. Fascist aesthetics are also the common thread running through Bertolucci's Conformist (1970), a meditation on what governs adherence to Fascism. Far from the onirism of a Fellini, Pasolini focuses on the Rome of the periphery, of small-time hoodlums and the down-and-outs, in Accatone (1961), shot in the - now trendy - Pigneto district, or Mamma Roma (1962), starring Anna Magnani, set for the most part near the Parc des Aqueducs, not far from Cinecittà. In 1974, Ettore Scola's Nous nous sommes tant aimés (We've Been So Loved) is a genealogy of the disillusionment and divisions emerging in Italian society. A possible sign of the pessimism prevailing in the early 1970s was the explosion of the giallo genre, halfway between thriller and baroque horror film, with no sense of coherence, led by Rome-born Dario Argento, who shot several scenes of his first film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) in Trastevere. Une Journée particulière (Ettore Scola, 1977) depicts the brief but moving encounter in 1930s Fascist Rome between Marcello Mastroianni, who plays an intellectual about to be imprisoned for his homosexuality, and Sophia Loren in the role of a housewife, set in the apartment complex where the characters live.
Rome, beautiful vestiges
Italian cinema was going through a period of dearth. Old masters such as Dino Risi sank sporadically into vulgarity, and only Nanni Moretti, whose career took off in the 1980s, took a fresh look at the city and the changes it was undergoing. Voluntarily autobiographical, his films explore an intimate geography of the Italian capital, away from the tourist circuits, as in Diary (1994) with his eternal Vespa. Peter Greenaway celebrates Rome's architectural splendors in Le Ventre de l'architecte (1987). The city seemed to have been neglected until Anthony Minghella filmed an adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), featuring the Piazza Navona, the monumental sculptures of the Capitoline Museums and the ruins of the Roman Forum. Romanzo Criminale (Michele Placido, 2006), a lengthy fresco on the Mafia and its links with political circles, made a big splash outside Italy, before being adapted into a series, providing an opportunity to get to grips with the dialect of Rome's suburbs and the country's tortuous history. Gabriele Muccino specializes, not without talent, in romantic comedy(Comme toi, 2000) or mainstream drama(Juste un baiser, 2001) before leaving for Hollywood. Gianni et les Femmes (Gianni Di Gregorio, 2010) recalls the charms of 1960s Italian comedy, featuring the late-night demon of a sixty-year-old. Two names have stood out in recent years. First there's Matteo Garrone, director of Moi Capitaine (2023), which failed to catch on until he left his native Rome, and Gomorra (2008), about the Neapolitan mafia. And Paolo Sorrentino, originally from Naples, who made the reverse journey to film La Grande Bellezza (2013) in Rome. There's probably no better tourist tract than this film, which, using La Dolce vita as its model, offers an enchanting portrait of the city. The festivities begin with a concert at the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola, then the camera whirls around the city, with its many gardens (the Giardino di Sant'Alessio or the lush alleys of the Palazzo Sacchetti), along the Tiber in the early morning, suspending yourself in the Parco degli Acquedotti for a performance, scrutinizing the decadent, techno-sounding parties of Rome's post-Berlusconi bourgeoisie, then accompanying the main character on his nightly strolls through the piazza Navona or via Veneto. To make matters worse, the latter has an apartment with a terrace overlooking the Colosseum. Sorrentino previously observed the inner workings of power in Il Divo (2008), which retraced the long political career of seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Rome continues to provide an inexhaustible source of subjects, as the seat of not only political but also religious power, to which Nanni Moretti devoted a mischievous fable in Habemus Papam (2011), before Sorrentino filmed his series The Young Pope (2016) with Jude Law. Woody Allen continued his tour of Europe's great cities with To Rome With Love (2012), a slightly anodyne diversion that is a pretext for revisiting a postcard Rome. Rome (2005-2007), a peplum series whose filming required the construction of monumental sets at Cinecittà, helped revive the recent craze for series, but had to be stopped after two seasons due to excessive costs. Since then, the city has only made fleeting appearances in series, although we can mention Suburra (2017-2019), whose title refers to a district of ancient Rome, as well as Gomorra, which returns for the umpteenth time to the links and confrontations between the mafia and the political and religious powers. In his film about Berlusconi, Silvio et les autres (2018), set between Rome and Sardinia, Sorrentino indulges unequivocally in vulgarity and shows signs of running out of steam, far from the success that was La Grande Bellezza. The other figurehead of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone, chooses the deprived suburbs of Rome, partly recreated in a ghost town on the outskirts of Naples, as the setting for Dogman (2018), a cruel and macabre tale that shows that Roman cinema still has a bright future ahead of it.
