Drop your phone, we’re watching a Masterpiece !
Usually, we watch films with one eye, more to “watch a movie” than to really see it. “Rocco and His Brothers“ has that rare power.
Despite its black and white format, it captures our full attention from the very first minutes.
How do you recognize a cinematic masterpiece? You don’t want to miss a single moment.
Rocco and His Brotherslands and pins us down, especially in black and white!
Visconti, the magician of images, plunges us into a visual trance with visceral intensity.
The first reunion scene, you live it, you don’t just watch it. Ah, Italian families!
Nothing more fascinating than their theatrical disputes against a backdrop of social misery.
The camera makes us feel what the screen can’t — we’re in the effervescence, and my attention spins, spins, spins, and will keep spinning until the final scene!
Because the Parondi brothers, it’s a f* dramatic opera in the open air.
Rocco and His Brothers takes us into a time capsule, with the crazy charm of the 50s and 60s — it reeks of authenticity, and I love it!
It’s mischievous, playful, and devilishly seductive.
Devilishly smart too — it’s a history lesson, a dive into a magnificently imperfect past, where the old Italy of olive trees meets the modern and ruthless Milan of the social housing. Fleeing the world of the South for the city of towers and vices that lead to their downfall.
Very quickly, the story centers on Simone, the brute, the failure; and Rocco, SOOOO hot with his kindness and sensitivity.
Cliché? No, a proper modern greek tragedy.
The love scenes? A sound chant, a ballet where every movement is a musical note.
Annie Girardot, brilliant and tragic, plays Nadia.
Her character is both vulnerable and indomitable, a force of nature trapped between Rocco’s love and Simone’s destructive possessiveness.
She is the very embodiment of tragic beauty, a figure that haunts us long after the film ends.
She leaves me with the bitter taste that the most authentic love will always be thwarted.
The fight scenes are bestial choreographies between a lion and a hyena.
Right from the start, violence erupts at the foot of the blocks.
Beasts, brothers torn apart by the city, who feed on hate at the foot of the buildings.
Two lions — Simonevs.Rocco — boxers to boot, one of whom (spoiler: Simone) has turned into a hyena through bad company.
A totemic figure of evil magistrally embodied by that leopard jacket, echoing that dark eye in an even darker black and a nearly non-existent white.
Hat-off Mr. Visconti!
And then, that scene where Nadia screams her love to Rocco in that sacrosanct trinity, on the sacrosanct roof of the Duomo of Milan.
“Ti amo, Ti amo, Ti amo Rocco” and an almost immediate reversal: “Ti odio, Ti odio, Ti odio” with a tear that tears the screen — the tear of Rocco himself.
It’s pure poetry, a tragic melody that resonates long after the end. Magistral!
And the end, precisely?
A horrific death, a woman who doesn’t want to die, yet already sacrificed on the altar of violence, a modern Christ. The question remains: could it have been otherwise? Are the Parondi brothers’ misfortunes inevitable? Was their flight from the world of olives to the city of towers just an inevitable descent into hell?