Film Review: Paisan (Paisà, 1946)

Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated 1945 drama Rome, Open City is considered to be the rawest and most authentic depiction of the Second World War in Italy. That film, however, barely references the Allies, who played a large role in those events. Rod E. Geiger, the film’s American producer and a veteran of the US Army Signal Corps, suggested Rossellini address this issue in his next film. Rossellini listened to him, and the result was the 1946 war anthology drama Paisà, better known under its English title Paisan.

The title refers to “paisano”, a Neapolitan word that, like the generic Italian word “paesano”, literally means “countryman”, and which US military servicemen in Italy used for the local population. The film is made up of six stories, set in different sections of Italy and depicting different stages of the Allied campaign.

The first story is set in Sicily during the initial Allied landing in July 1943 and shows a US Army patrol entering a small village, with a young soldier, Joe (played by Robert Van Loon), bonding with a girl named Carmela (played by Carmela Sazio) despite not speaking the language.

The second episode is set in autumn 1943, after the Allies have taken the strategic port city of Naples, and a black US military policeman, Joe (played by Dots Johnson), tries to find the street urchin Pasquale (played by Alfonsino Bovino) who stole his shoes.

The third episode takes place in late 1944 in liberated Rome, where Fred (played by Gar Moore), a US Army tank driver on leave, gets drunk and picks a prostitute named Francesca (played by Maria Michi), unaware that she is the girl he had met and fallen madly in love with months before while liberating the city.

The fourth story takes place in August 1944 during the battle for Florence, when US Army combat nurse Harriet (played by Harriet Meade) abandons her post and goes to the still-contested city where her pre-war lover is rumoured to be leading the Partisans.

The fifth story takes place months later in a monastery close to the German “Gothic Line” in the Apennine Mountains, which is visited by US Army chaplain Captain Bill Martin (played by William Tubbs) and two fellow chaplains who are, much to the distress of the monks, revealed to be a Protestant and a Jew.

The sixth story takes place in December 1944 in the marshes of the Po Valley behind German lines, where a small number of American OSS and British SOE soldiers assist local partisans, only to find themselves without ammunition or supplies and being brutally chased by numerically superior German forces.

Paisan is an anthology film, a form that was enthusiastically embraced by Italian cinema in the next few decades. In the case of Rossellini’s film, it represents both its strength and its weakness. Originally envisioned to feature seven rather than six stories showing interactions between American servicemen and local Italians, Paisan suffers from a lack of narrative coherence, with the only connection between the segments being explanatory narration by Giulio Panicali, followed by documentary stock footage. Rossellini, on the other hand, maintains his trademark Neorealist style based on location shooting and non-professional actors, further enhanced by the use of bombed-out buildings, and actors and extras who relive traumatic events from the very recent past.

As with many anthology films, the quality of each segment varies a lot. A good thing about Paisan is that many such segments would appeal to different sets of the audience. Arguably the best story is the one set in Rome, which almost perfectly encapsulates the harsh realities of war, mainly through the transient nature of seemingly perfect relationships and the horrific effects war-related poverty can have on people’s morals; Maria Michi, an actress who portrays a character in some way similar to the one she portrayed in Rome, Open City, delivers the best performance of the film.

For fans of action, the segment set in Florence provides a very believable depiction of urban combat where the situation is fluid, death is random, and freedom fighters summarily execute suspected German collaborators with little consideration. The segment most likely to be closest to Rossellini’s own heart is set in the monastery, with the final speech of Captain Martin encapsulating the director’s own Catholic humanism. The final segment is the darkest, featuring disturbing depictions of German atrocities, including a heart-breaking scene where a crying toddler is revealed as the only survivor in a massacred village.

Paisan, like so many Neorealist films, was not too popular in its native country, but it was, following its premiere at the first post-war Venice Film Festival, enthusiastically embraced by international critics. Rossellini would later make another film in the same style, set in post-war Germany and titled Germany, Year Zero, that would make the final piece of his “Neorealist Trilogy”.

Today’s viewers might be impressed by Rossellini’s realism and uncompromising bleakness, but this approach has been embraced by other, often more successful, film makers, making Paisan interesting mostly to viewers interested in cinema history or wanting to see an authentic depiction of dark chapters of 20th-century history.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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