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Bellissima, in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema. Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina Apicella), to be a star. She will use whatever she has-her savings, her own sympathetic sex appeal-in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians call a raccomandazione di ferro. In the end, she gets what she wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel, and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her. But though the cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to be Visconti’s. “The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later. “The whole subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept. To allow Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was actually in the hazard. Which is not possible. Magnani as a personality being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy. Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs. Her character-played by anyone else-is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child. But no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani. Everything she wants- certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected fame-she wants directly, in a straight and open ma
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The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity. I made her what she is today may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani-the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman-is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe-her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her. Mi raccomando, eh?-uffa!-per carità!-abbia pazienza!-O dio mio!-come no?-meno male! Italian is a language packed with verbal fillers. Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need-smile or insult-in order to let her pass. In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cu
One morning an eccentric acting teacher approaches the family. She wants to give little Maria lessons that Maddalena can’t afford. Alone in her bedroom, Maddalena considers the offer, combing her unruly hair and addressing her own reflection in the mirror: “To act… after all, what is acting? If I imagined to be somebody else… if I pretended to be somebody else… I’d be acting… But you can act… You’re my daughter and you can become an actress. You really can. I could have, too, if I had wanted to.”
With Magnani, womanhood is utterly real-it simply does what it must to get by.
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Much Italian cinema revolves around the classic Italian philosophical problem: blonde or brunette? For Fellini, the answer was, usually, both. Antonioni solved the dilemma on an abstract intellectual plane by discovering Monica Vitti, the blonde with the face of a brunette. In Visconti’s Bellissima no counterweight is put up against black-haired A
Bellissima is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in a female movie star can hardly be imagined.
In the parrucchiere where little Maria is taken for a haircut:
Hairdresser: (to Maddalena) I could give you a good style, too.
Maddalena: Don’t even try, no one has managed that.
Hairdresser: I could manage.
[63] Literally a recommendation of iron. A good word that will secure an applicant in a position.