Director: Raffaello Matarazzo
The second half of a diptych melodrama from Raffaello Matarazzo, The White Angel continues the plot threads of Nobody’s Children, but additionally ads an almost mystical dimension with the appearance of a woman who looks exactly like Luisa (Yvonne Sanson), the lover-turned-nun that was the object of Count Guido’s obsession (Amedeo Nazzari) in the first installment. As with Hitchcock’s Vertigo three years later, the doppelgänger becomes a means of “doing over” one’s past, allowing the potential for self-destructive immersion therapy. In their first encounter, Guido does little but stare at Lina longingly before falling mysteriously ill. Along with her beauty, however, Lina’s appearance spells a whole new chain of disastrous events, the hands of fate not quite done with these characters. What distinguishes The White Angel is not just the pre-Vertigo treatment of obsession, but that it is film with a wealth of female characters playing nearly every archetype. Sanson herself plays both the nun and a swindler, and in the latter half of the picture Lina finds herself in a women’s prison, where one of her fellow inmates will endanger a child. Melodramas often deal with topics of femininity, but rarely does one see the sheer breadth of character types as in The White Angel. Furthermore, Matarazzo’s fixation on the highly-Catholic narrative reaches a beautifully poetic destination, marking enormous character changes and suggesting that a new chapter will be wrought out of all of the misery that has been endured.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1951, nobody's children, raffaello matarazzo
Director: Raffaello Matarazzo
Although Raffaello Matarazzo had been all but forgotten by the time the Criterion Collection released a quartet of his post-war melodramas in 2011, in his day he found enormous success with Italian audiences, even out-performing legendary neorealist filmmakers like Rossellini and De Sica. It is somewhat simplistic to say that his films provided an alternative to the new push towards neorealism–although his films often utilized a traditional melodramatic sensibility, he set them in real, naturalistic environments. Look no further than the massive rock quarry in Nobody’s Children, which in its eminent threat is reflective of the way that the plot gives way to radical plot twists and turns of fate. While there is enough plot in the picture for twenty, the tropes are all familiar. There’s a pair of lovers, the forces who try to keep them apart, and finally the bastard child who will come to learn of his true parentage. Matarazzo shifts through these dynamics accessibly, sensationalizing the material to the extreme in sequences involving a roaring fire and an avalanche. If the soap-operatic quality of the picture is the root of its pleasure, the landscapes (including the aforementioned quarry and long, lonely village roads) keep it earthbound. The two sensibilities seem at odds with each other, but it is these very incongruities that make it memorable.
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