The other day, someone on social media posted this challenge: Name something that most people consider to be a masterpiece but you don’t like. Upon reading that, I immediately blurted out: “Journey to Italy.”
I’m sorry, but I’ve watched that 1954 Roberto Rossellini film three times and read nearly every glowing review explaining why it is a masterpiece, but I don’t see a masterpiece. Instead, I see a tedious work with two great stars lost in a dreary melodrama.
For those who have yet to experience the film, the story focuses on the upper-class English couple Alex and Katherine Joyce (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman), who drive to Naples to sell an estate inherited from a late uncle. The couple are in the eighth year of their childless marriage, but they realize this trip is the first time that they’ve been alone together. But the marriage has been crumbling quietly for some time and the trip exposes the fault lines between the couple.
After the tension between them becomes too uncomfortable, they separate in their own explorations of the Naples area. Alex heads to Capri where he tries and fails to find a romantic rendezvous away from his wife, while Katherine obsessively visits the local museums and ruins where she experiences a strange bonding with the society of ancient times. The couple’s unhappiness with each other results in the agreement to divorce, but when they become stuck in a religious procession they abruptly reconcile.
Rossellini and writer Vitaliano Brancati loosely adapted the Colette novel “Duo” (without providing proper credit) and lifted a chunk out of James Joyce’s “The Dead” for this story, but the director wanted to keep his stars off-balance during production by withholding their scripts for a scene up until he was ready to being shooting. In some scenes, the director insisted that the actors improvise. Sanders would later disparage Rossellini’s strategy, and his distaste from this method is visible on screen – he is clearly phoning in his performance, using his majestic voice to spit out sour and sarcastic lines as if he was doing a send-up of his Hollywood persona.
But poor Bergman, then Mrs. Rossellini. This is yet another feature where her husband casts her as a neurotic foreigner who is flummoxed by the Italian culture where she has been uneasily dumped. There is nothing in Bergman’s character that corresponds with how real people behave. Whether staring at museum statues as if she had a telepathic bond with those inanimate objects or looking in disbelief at pregnant women walking down the streets in Naples, Bergman strives for the appearance of alienation but only comes across as ridiculous.
In my opinion, “Journey to Italy” is one of the most boring and overrated films of all time. The story is uninvolving, the fish-out-of-water situations involving the brittle English couple in earthy Naples becomes tiresome, and Enzo Serafin’s black-and-white cinematography is flat and dull.
But, yes, my feelings appear to be a minority view – especially among those who have a stake in maintaining its reputation. Consider what the Janus Film press kit claimed when it re-released the film in 2013: “More than just an anatomy of a relationship, Rossellini’s masterpiece is a heartrending work of emotional transcendence and profound spirituality. Considered an ancestor of the existential works of Michelangelo Antonioni; hailed as a groundbreaking work of modernism by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma; and named by Martin Scorsese as one of his favorite films, ‘Journey to Italy’ is a breathtaking cinematic landmark.”
Rossellini initially planned to present this endeavor under the title “New Wine,” for whatever reason. And while Sanders often had the funniest lines in his films, he was quite the smart aleck in real life. When this film was being ready for release, he tartly quipped to an interviewer, “I heard the film will be called ‘Vino Nuovo’ (‘New Wine’) and that’s perfect, for new wine is always awful.”