Anima nera

Written for the stage by camp aesthete Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, but directed for the screen by dour Marxist Roberto Rossellini, this film is a fascinating disaster. It's the wreckage left by two creative talents in head-on collision.

Vittorio Gassman plays the 'black soul' of the title, an upwardly mobile Italian who was once a bisexual rent boy. Now cosily married into the upper bourgeoisie, he and his unsuspecting wife (Annette Stroyberg) are hoping to move into a sumptuous villa he has inherited from a former male lover. Ah, but this is a movie, so sinners must be punished - however photogenic and well-dressed they may be!

Enter his dead lover's sister (Eleonora Rossi Drago) - one of those outrageously glamorous lesbians who live mainly in French and Italian films. She demands that Gassman renounce all claim to the villa, or risk exposure and public scandal. Stroyberg walks out in disgust. Our hero takes refuge with an old 'comrade in arms' - a hooker (Nadja Tiller) who's about to marry a rich American. He tells her how he survived World War II by seducing an SS officer.

Given a sympathetic director - Visconti or Bolognini or Patroni Griffi himself - Anima Nera could be powerful stuff. Rossellini is simply the wrong man for the job. He does make a half-hearted stab at high-style decadence in the obligatory 60s nightclub scene. But his one moment of inspired film-making comes right at the end...

The hero's problems solved (temporarily, at least) his bride starts lecturing him on how to be a proper husband. He presses his face to a window - as if gasping for air - a prisoner of the bourgeois world he has always aspired to.

This movie is icily impersonal.All that made Rossellini one of the greatest directors ever seems to have vanished here.Rossellini's passion was history and the way he used the different backgrounds (WW2 in Italy,Germany after the fall,Europa in the early fifties ("Europa 51" was a revealing title) ,carbonari,etc) was subtle,engrossing and absorbing.He would continue in that vein with his admirable film about Louis XIV.

The early sixties context is rather vague .Rossellini's directing shows the influence of the FRench nouvelle vague ,not for better (if at least he had borrowed from Antonioni): filming on location in the streets of Roma,a very vague screenplay ,a character -well played by Vittorio Gassmann- with frames of mind.We will never really know whether he is a real b... as Eleonora Rossi Drago's baroness claims or simply a child of the war.He is 36 after all,and like his old friend Mimosa ,he probably got a raw deal,which his young wife cannot understand.The movie really takes off when Rossi-Drago appears.The first thirty minutes are almost worthless.

If you want to start a Rossellini collection,this is not the one to choose first.