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.It is we who put illusions into the heads of mothers and little girls.We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the assistants, the producers, the hangers-on—powerful men with their powerful boredom—climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves in attitudes of jolly contempt.In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-thing, always appraised by that measure.Today, tomorrow—this beauty contest is as old as the judgment of Paris.The descendants of these men still audition veline62 each Roman summer.As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles.Now, here, in postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile.“You’re starting early!” cries Blasetti.2Bellissima, in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema.Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina Apicella), to be a star.She will use whatever she has—her savings, her own sympathetic sex appeal—in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians call a raccomandazione di ferro.63 In the end, she gets what she wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel, and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her.But though the cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to be Visconti’s.“The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later.“The whole subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept.To allow Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was actually in the hazard.Which is not possible.Magnani as a personality being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy.Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs.Her character—played by anyone else—is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child.But no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani.Everything she wants— certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected fame—she wants directly, in a straight and open manner, as men are said to want things.Her dream is strategic, not delusional.And in her mind, the child remains only a child, come tutte: “Well, at that age they’re all pretty.” This is her sensible reply to a calculated compliment from the slick young stranger, Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a production assistant low down in the Cinecittà food chain who is willing to do certain favors in exchange for certain favors—the oldest of Italian stories.“Yes, that’s true,” he agrees.“But I prefer their mothers.” Annovazzi is younger than Maddalena, skinnier, and in a bland cinematic sense, better looking.But she knows as we know: he is the shadow of her shadow.On the other hand, he has access to the director, Blasetti.All this passes through Magnani’s face in a mannerist instant: a sharp glance in which she responds at once to the cheek of the boy and the perfect civility and necessity of the compliment.(It would be rude of him not to notice that she is a goddess!) Few actresses are so directly appreciative of their own earthy, natural attractions.On-screen, Magnani is the opposite of neurotic.3The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world.For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice.Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity.I made her what she is today may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence.Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent.Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public.(She can become a national treasure.) Magnani—the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman—is Italy as it dreams of itself.Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese.Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side.Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe—her own devices seem to be all she has.Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her.Mi raccomando, eh?—uffa!—per carità!—abbia pazienza!—O dio mio!—come no?—meno male! Italian is a language packed with verbal fillers.Magnani makes musical use of them.No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another.And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need—smile or insult—in order to let her pass.In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry.Blasetti: “But I said the child has to be six or seven years old, not less.she looks a bit small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.” The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts adoration and contempt.All women are artificial.All women are, in the end, actresses [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]