ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS

Rocco e i suoi fratelli

Italy, France, 1960, 178m

Director: Luchino Visconti  

Cast: Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori, Katina Paxinou, Paolo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale

 Whenever Luchino Visconti was asked which of his films was his favorite, the answer was always the same: Rocco and His Brothers. “It is my most personal and perhaps my most beloved film.” An intoxicatingly concentrated family story steeped in love, self-sacrifice, sex, betrayal, forgiveness and farewell.

Sunny Lucania in southern Italy — a blessed land of olive trees, moonlit yearning and rainbows.
But now it is winter there: a rain-soaked dawn over the Adriatic Sea, a sullen sky and poverty.

When the Parondi family, buoyed by great hopes, moves to noisy, rapidly expanding Milan, they bring with them not only hardship but the seeds of a family drama: the patriarchal values carried north from the South collide with the harsh reality of the big city.

The northern capital dazzles and seduces with a life in which success, money and love seem easily within reach. All you have to do is stretch out your hand. Or close your eyes to what only yesterday seemed unacceptable.

It is hard not to succumb to temptation when the only thing you have ever truly valued is the fragile solidarity between brothers and a mother’s love.

Thus begins an epic saga of spiritual exile, distorted loyalty and masculinity wounded by ambition and jealousy.

All of it unfolds against the soaring Gothic filigree of Milan Cathedral’s marble, the mists over the Naviglio canal and the cold lights of the city outskirts.

And boxing. A great deal of boxing.

Yet this is not really a story about boxing, but about moral vertigo. And about a family fractured under the weight of its own myth.

Each brother, trying to find his own path, is drawn into a vortex of love, destructive self-sacrifice and betrayal. And the result is a life laid upon the devilish altar of noble intentions, where there is only one step from blind, reckless submission to crime…

This is a film not to be missed, even if its unbearable emotional intensity breaks your heart. Exactly the kind of experience that, for perfectly understandable reasons, many people might prefer to avoid.

Visconti fused the seething, chaotic reality of Italian life with exalted operatic expression, achieving a cathartic power comparable only to that of ancient tragedy.

The black-and-white images created by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno glow with a soft, pearlescent light, heightening the film’s drama, depth and nobility.

A powerful, majestic film, with Nino Rota’s magnificent score and an outstanding cast, it is still regarded as an unsurpassed masterpiece.

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

Language: Italian

Subtitles:  English 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCOiCaHVVFk