The Worst Film Ever

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Look, it's Rossellini in the Fifties, B&W, with Bergman, shot at all these great sites in Italy. So sure, on some level I'm going to enjoy it. But that doesn't mean I have to buy into its reputation as a great movie. The story centers on the relationship of an "English" couple. They've been married for eight years. They're unhappy. Their marriage is on its last legs. At the end of the movie, they get back together. So the movie has to be how whatever we see happen in it culminates in their reconciliation. And it utterly fails to do that. First, WHY are these two together at all? She's obviously not English. How did they get together? But more important, the husband, played by George Sanders, is SO unappealing, so cold, so wretched, that's it's impossible to see what attracted a romantic like the Bergman character to him. I get it that he's English, upper (or upper-middle) class, emotionally stunted from going to English public schools, etc. You don't expect him to insist on couples' counseling. (I love the Sanders line, when he wants to describe the essence of a couple he met, and settles on simply "talkative.") But Rossellini has got to give us SOMETHING to go on, something to show us that he has some humanity, or had at one point. Or show us in the film how he has changed, and why, because of his time in Italy. This is a guy who goes into a rage because his wife takes the car without asking him. But there's so little sign that he can be more than what we see. He has a short dalliance with a woman who tells him that she is going back to her old lover. And you get the feeling if she hadn't said no, he would still be with her. As for Bergman, her character is more sympathetic and interesting. But she looks frumpy -- why hire Bergman and then make her frumpy? -- she's self-pitying, and weak. She stirs some sympathy, but not much. At the end, in a last-second, not-believable change of heart, the husband says to his wife: "If I tell you I love you, do you promise not to use it against me?" Just what every woman longs to hear.

Billed as one of Roberto Rossellini's best, Journey to Italy aka Strangers (1954) is difficult to appreciate unless you understand the language (Italian) or can read its English subtitles as fast as they appear on the screen. Plus, if you're reading, you're missing a lot of the scenery - Naples, Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius, and Capri - which is so beautiful (and could have been more so, had it been filmed in color).Also challenging for many moviegoers is that there isn't much of a plot; it's the study of a marriage that's collapsing after 8 years. Even though it features Ingrid Bergman (the director's wife at the time) and George Sanders, I find it hard to recommend to a general audience. However, the print I saw on TCM was barely 80 minutes in length, as much as 15 minutes less than the original running time, so it's possible there were scenes missing that would have made it more palatable.Katherine (Bergman) and Alex Joyce (Sanders) travel to Naples to sell a home that was left to him by a recently deceased uncle, who was popular in the idyllic town. They realize that they hardly know each other as they struggle to have any kind of meaningful dialogue or interactions without frustration or heartache. He's a workaholic while she's overly critical and sensitive. They no longer see each other as desirable, though each is curious to notice that their spouse is fun and attractive to others, when the couple mingles socially.For me, the film's best scene occurs after Alex returns late at night from a several days trip to Capri, where he was hot for a dalliance that didn't happen and Katherine is clearly hoping he'll romance her (absence makes the heart grow fonder). He's typically unaware - even aloof - of her wishes, and she's too timid to express her vulnerability, e.g. need of him. Unfortunately, much of the rest of this marital study fails to illuminate, and their reconciliation at the end feels as tacked on as any Hollywood production.

Katherine and Alex travel to Italy to take care of selling a house of Alex's family. Right at the beginning, before even arriving, Alex (George Sanders) complains about the boredom of the country and how he wants to get out as soon as possible. This boredom and hostility is carried to his marriage with Katherine (Ingrid Bergman), that hangs by a thin thread.The emotional weight is felted right in, when Ingrid's character says that she's surprised to know that she bores him that much. They have never been alone since their marriage, and this journey will prove them that they need the company to last that long. Early on, when they arrive at the hotel, it is decided that they should head to the bar. There, they meet some of George's friends and he explains that they are on a business trip. Katherine completes that it is a pleasure trip, too. Just this small dialogue details how they are not on the same page, not even about the journey they're in.When they split up and the husband goes to Naples, it is noticeable how they miss each other, not just by words, but how they react with other people. Rossellini did a wonderful job with his actors, in particular with Ingrid Bergman, in their best collaboration since Europe '51.In the end, the couple notice how they can't be apart, and this journey proved it to them. It was necessary to reach rock-bottom to emerge to true love once and for all.This movie reminded me a lot of Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte. Albeit this is a more direct movie, the themes and conditions are almost repeated, but with different results.Bergman's performance is majestic. She impresses as much as she does in Hitchcock's Notorious, Spellbound and Curtiz's Casablanca. Now, Sanders' performance is top-notch, and in my opinion, succeeds his performance in his Academy Award-winning performance in All About Eve.In my opinion, it is an utterly beautiful movie, with great scenarios and performances, sustained by a wonderful screenplay and molded by an even better director.

It's another "Voyage to Italy" that lead me to that one, Martin Scorsese's documentary recollecting the Italian classics that forged his inspiration, among them was that intriguing Rosselini movie starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman. It didn't have a De Sica vibe but there had to be a reason Marty put it on his to-watch list.Indeed, "Voyage to Italy" is another of these raw diamonds like only Italian Neo-realism could produce. It starts with a couple coming from London to Napoli to sell a villa belonging to a recently deceased uncle. There's no further development in that element of the plot, the focus is on the relationship between Alex and Katherine Joyce, and from the first exchanges, we understand that something is not going well. And that journey in Italian countryside might affect their relationship, for better or worse.Fittingly, Ingrid Bergman gives an eerie 'Bergmanian' feeling to these first interactions, an odd mix of personal involvement and total detachment that you can only spot when you're married. I've been married for four years now, and I can tell when a husband and a wife only talks to break the silence. This is how dialogue is crucial in the movie, what they say is secondary to the story, it's all in the 'how they say it'.What we take from the exposition though is that this highly educated, upper class, a bit worn out, couple never did anything together besides marrying: no children and no travels. So, this trip to Italy might be a good medicine against the monotony that kept poisoning their couple or the deathblow on an agonizing marriage. She admires poetry, Mediterranean idleness and fascination for sweet and simple things; he abhors this laziness, so common among little people. While they converged to the same point, they couldn't be more divergent everywhere else. And it doesn't come as a surprise when they choose to visit Italy separately.Katherine visits museums, temples, she's fascinated by art, by these looks on marble statues, by these colossal relics where men identified imitated Gods, saw things in big, and she seems to remember how little his life has shrunk to. The delight of these visits is also spoiled by the old guides whose nonchalant and rapid tone make impossible any form of contemplation or meditation on such majestic beauty, anything to forget her marital boredom.Alex is more drastic; he simply meets other women, spending as many pleasant evenings as he can. After all, didn't he see Katherine being courted by all these luscious Italian bourgeois during a party and let it go? Did she or did she not intervene when he was talking to an old feminine acquaintance the night before? Alex rhymes with complex, his language consists on hurting to provoke a reaction, and bizarrely, a non-reaction is much more displeasing. At the end, they never acknowledge having fun and never really talk. Why? In fact, both are looking for ways out. It's obvious that Katherine needs Alex more than a guide. And so does Alex. During a crucial night, he meets a prostitute and takes her for a ride, she then confesses in the car that she was about to commit suicide and needed someone to spend the night. Alex doesn't accept as if he felt it could be that mistake he might regret it forever, and no girl yet would be worth such sacrifice. Yet when he's back to the hotel, he wastes another opportunity to let his heart talk.The day after, Katherine goes for a last trip to the catacombs, discovering meanwhile the joyful population of Napoli, full children and pregnant women, everything she lacks. Her guide, a lady who works at the hotel, notices the same because she can't have children. As a married man, I remember before my wife got pregnant, we couldn't help noticing those who were. Loveless and childless people have the eye for such things. And Katherine doesn't even have the luxury to love Alex through a child.And that boiling frustration explodes when she's confronted again to an infuriated Alex and the argument escalates to a "let's divorce" that sounds the death knell of their marriage. But they have no time to digest the decision as they're coerced to visit Pompeii's ruins. And in a heart-pounding moment, we follow the disinterment of a corpse, followed by another one, a husband and a wife, literally rooted to the spot by a sudden torrent of lava and ashes. A moved Katherine leaves the site, followed by Alex, who'll admit later the sight hit a sensitive chord too.In their way back, they're blocked by one of these typical Italian crowed processions, so they get out of the car. And while the taboo word was spoken, Katherine felt even more uncomfortable than she was at the beginning, and God, how true to life it is. Couples are weird you know, once you talk of separation, this is when you realize that there's something that deeply ties you to that person, more than love, a sort of moral commitment and visceral need to stay together. Alex still believes it is the right choice, probably exhilarated by the perspective of enjoying life, too short to be drowned in an ocean of unhappiness.And in one of the greatest twist endings, Katherine is literally swept along the human wave and literally taken out of Alex' hands. Alex feels then how precious she is for him and goes save her and they embrace … and there's no need for words anymore. We know they lanced the boil. And I wish this could be the last image of the film, the conclusion of an ordinary story speaking so many true statements about marriage.Indeed, there's more to discover in marriage than the country you visit as you might feel even more estranged to the beloved one than you are in the country.