Amore mio (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1964)

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Raffaello Matarazzo, which is for me, after Roberto Rossellini, perhaps with Vittorio Cottafavi, the greatest of the many great Italian filmmakers. I don’t even know yet if I ever will feel able to do so, even if now, at long last, I have finally managed to watch Amore mio (1964), his last movie, and Guai ai vinti! (1957), and therefore seen at least 33 of the 42 films he directed. Because, for all my admiration for Matarazzo, I still have a (small) reserve about several of even his greatest movies, of which he can even be not wholly guilty, since this (very common) “fault” could (or rather, should) be attributed to his various screenwriters: the (for my taste) too frequent presence (and machinations) of evil people as causes of the misfortunes and melodramatic sufferings, misunderstandings and conflicts of the protagonists (mostly women and children, but also men).

Since precisely that does not happen in Amore mio, which is one of the very few rare films by Matarazzo whose screenplay was single-handedly written by him, and furthermore, based on a storyline of his own, I am tempted to think this may have been his belated chance to free himself from the manicheist conventions of Italian melodrama.

Amore mio, I must warn you, was made exactly half a century ago. It is therefore a quite old-fashioned movie. Since it happens in Italy, roughly at that time, the religious beliefs and social or moral prejudices were those then at work for a large part of society. Fifty years is a long time, and really lots of things have radically changed during these last 50 years, usually making our life better, at least more free, more comfortable and somewhat easier to live, although this has deprived the genre of melodrama and even the tragic visions of life it usually conveys of a lot of the issues which were its foundation or its most dramatic assets. Most of the things that happen in Amore mio and drive a young girl to an attempted suicide and several other characters to sadness or despair would be nowadays seen as something much more common and less serious, easier to solve or remedy or at least to cope with, perhaps as problems, hardly as tragedies. This the melodrama has lost, along with the sense of guilt, the notion of sin and a lot of barriers and of acts which were forbidden or considered dishonorable, and therefore is now a film genre almost as vanishing as the western and the musical. And this change in society, individual behavior and values has made old melodramas to age spectacularly.

But for me the main thing is not how ancient Amore mio has become, specially to younger people, but the fact that probably it was already when it was conceived and made, an old-fashioned movie in every sense, the same as it happened with some other “last films” by great filmmakers, in particular another made also in 1964 an equally naked and swift, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud. The secret of both is pure emotion, without antics or embellishments.

And Matarazzo makes melodrama exist despite a complete absence of evil people: everybody in this film is good or learns to be better, everyone acts generously, even if sometimes mistakenly. And yet there is no happy ending. Which was not realistically feasible.

Texto preparatorio para la presentación de la película en el Festival de Locarno el 12 de agosto de 2014.