Cesare Conversi, a 53-year-old plumber, has quite a scare on his way home from work one day in Rome. The tram on which he is riding is crowded with passengers and a conductor climbs aboard to collect tickets. The conductor asks a man seated by a window for his ticket. When the man doesn't respond, the conductor shakes his shoulder as if to wake him. The man slumps over in his seat. A woman exclaims, "he's dead!" The tram stops. Cesare climbs down from the tram with a look of genuine fear on his face. He walks away but then he turns around and goes back as a crowd gathers to see the dead man. He and the dead man looked about the same age.
Late that night, Cesare can't sleep. He turns on the light, sits up in bed and lights a cigarette. He chokes, stubs it out and turns off the light. At 7 in the morning his landlady knocks at his door. He sits up and starts to put on his socks, but suddenly stops and lies down again. At 9 the landlady's toothsome daughter knocks to tell him one of his clients needs his help. Awake, Cesare lies in bed. Finally, after apparently sleeping all day, he rises, puts on an evening suit and goes for a stroll past the Colosseum (yes, that one) where a friend, Amilcare, is painting white stripes on the pavement with other city workers. Cesare tells him about the dead man on the tram and that he has decided not to go back to work.
Thereafter, the story, just like Cesare, loses all sense of direction. It is as if Petri and Guerra thought up a certain number of adventures for Cesare, killing time before time kills him, until they accumulated enough for a feature length film. What neither Cesare nor the film is prepared to admit to us is that he hasn't the slightest idea what he's looking or waiting for. This is mainly due to Cesare not being a particularly intelligent or even curious man. He talks to his doctor: "You're very well-educated, so please, tell me, when will I die?"
Wandering around Rome one evening, Cesare happens to see Graziella, the landlady's daughter, who is supposed to be working late at her job, get out of an expensive sports car escorted by a man of a certain age. She is 17. The next day Cesare rebukes her and gives her 50,000 lira so she can get another job. (She spends it on a wig.) Graziella promises to pay him back, and then offers herself to him. He has the grace to turn her down, but he recognizes that what she is offering him is life itself. "La vida!" he tells her as he smiles and gets up to leave. Next we see him choosing from among Rome's many streetwalkers. The one he chooses leads him to a hill overlooking the city. They lie down on the ground, but Cesare can't perform. "Was it the climb?" she asks. He wearily puts his jacket back on and walks away.
In his utterly aimless - and ultimately circuitous - quest for life's meaning, Cesare returns by bus to his old village. Depopulated of nearly everyone he once knew, having died of drink or are in the process of dying, there are more dogs than people. In a quite surreal moment, he locates one old friend, deep in his bottle of chianti, on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful but, lit by a strange light from the sky, a nightmarish landscape. His old friend falls down, weeping. Cesare hitches a ride back to Rome.
Another day he catches sight of a woman named Giulia with whom he was once romantically involved (although at this, too, Cesare was a disappointment). He follows her to a public bath where she is working. Eventually, he gets up the courage to approach her. She is now married and has children, but Cesare asks her to meet him at the movies. In the theatet they find their seats, but notice a young couple a few rows behind them passionately making out. Cesare looks at them. So does Giulia. She gets up from her seat and Cesare follows her outside. She asks him what he wants from her. It's obvious, yet he can't find the words to tell her. She walks away from him in the street.
Inevitably Cesare runs out of money. He inquires about a pension but is told that he needs to be 60 before he can get the full amount. He runs into a young man he once knew who introduces him to the idea of a scam that would land him a lot of cash. All he has to do is have his arm or his leg broken by a professional, make it look like it happened in an accident, and collect the insurance. He chooses to have his arm broken, and there is a terribly funny scene in which Cesare places his arm across two cement blocks so that a large man can smash his arm with a pipe. After two abortive attempts, Cesare runs away, his arm intact and his pockets still empty.
Predictably, Cesare has to return to work, crawling around people's toilets. On his way home on the tram, he seems overwhelmed by the faces and views passing by his window, accelerating until he becomes dizzy and covers his eyes. Finally, a conductor tells him, "Sir. Sir! We have arrived!" Cesare doesn't stir. The empty tram pulls away from us down a dark tunnel.
What the film desperately needed was more humor. There is a scene in which Cesare encounters an art expert at a museum. They strike up a conversation about art, which the art expert assures Cesare has nothing to do with what's in the museum. Outside, Cesare tells him his profession and the expert invites him to his house. His house is filled with quasi-abstract paintings. Under the film's credits we are shown engravings ("incisione") by Lorenzo Vespignani, and the works hanging in the house resemble them. He takes Cesare to a room in which a large sink is stopped up with black water. He asks Cesare to fix it. "Do you have a wrench?" he asks as he crawls under the sink.
Salvo Randone was a marvelous character actor whose career didn't take off until the 1960s. He appeared in a few other Petri films. He has the right hangdog face and world-weary demeanor to invest Cesare with enough to hold our interest through the film. Petri made just eleven films in a career of more than 40 years. He was fully engaged with his time and had the talent to evoke it. I reviewed his marvelous film We Still Kill the Old Way on this blog.
But there is something more to this film - something oddly prophetic. In the story written by Petri and Tonino Guerra, Cesare is 53. He feels pains in his chest after running up some stairs and he goes to his doctor for a checkup. Assured that it wasn't a heart attack, he tells the doctor, "Doctor, I'm afraid."
"Afraid of what?" the doctor asks.
"I'm afraid of… the thing. The cancer."
"I'm afraid also," the doctor tells him.
On November 10, 1982 Elio Petri died of cancer. He was 53 years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment