Umberto D

Vittorio De Sica directed Umberto D, a modest and somewhat sentimental film about urban poverty among the elderly, in 1952.  The film is part of a trilogy of movies that include the earlier neo-realist classics, Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Shoeshine (1946), both pictures that portray misery arising as a result of the dislocations of World War II.  By 1952, the general economic crisis appears to have abated and the hero's plight seems more of a special case than an overwhelming and general calamity.  Indeed, in the film's opening shot, De Sica makes a claim for the particularity of Umberto D's dilemma -- we see a phalanx of well-dressed old men, all of them in suit and tie, marching in a Roman street.  (A bus turns right into the crowd of protesters, something that is not so much an intentional slight, but an example of typical Italian nonchalance with respect to the rules of the road).  The old men are pensioners and they are marching because the government has apparently delayed their payments.  Among these old men is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant now fallen on hard times. 

Umberto lives in a rented room with his small dog, a sort of terrier, called Flike.  As is the case with many homeless people, his problems are aggravated by his pet, but the old man is fiercely loyal to the small animal -- the creature is obviously his pride and joy.  During the famine after the war, Umberto D seems to have done a favor for his blonde and imperious landlady -- apparently, he provided her with meat and helped her to stave off starvation.  She seems to have never forgiven the old man for this kindness, presumably something that she recalls with shame.  The blonde is big and brassy and wears clothing with bruising NFL-style shoulder pads.  She seems to be a would-be opera singer and runs a kind of salon for her admirers.  Because she is planning marriage, she wants Umberto D out of her house and will not accept the old man's pathetic partial payments on past-due rent.  Ultimately, the old man avoids eviction by seeking refuge in a charity hospital -- he is, in fact, seriously ill.  He leaves his beloved Flike with the pregnant maid serving in the home, Maria.  When Umberto gets out of the hospital, he finds that Maria has lost Flike and that his room has been ripped to pieces as part of the nuptial renovation of the house.  Umberto finds the dog at the animal shelter (and extermination center).  He unsuccessfully tries to cadge money from old friends, learning that when you're down and out, you are essentially invisible.  (The two men that he approaches smile at him, respond with polite non sequiturs, and escape onto the first bus that shows up to avoid helping him.)  After some additional misadventures, Umberto D decides to kill himself.  But he isn't able to find anyone to take charge of his dog.  Ultimately, he leaves the dog in a public park and tries to hide while Flike looks for him.  The dog sniffs him out and so the old man decides that he will take the dog in his arms and hurl them both into the path of oncoming train.  As is often the case with suicides planned by the elderly, the dog resists and saves him.  Flike is unhappy with Umberto D's erratic behavior and standoffish after the suicide attempt.  However, the old man wins back the dog's affection by playing with him with pine cones and, in the final scene, master and hound are reunited but facing the most dismal and uncertain of futures. 

Several of the scenes in the film are lacerating.  The old man's miserable attempt at begging, something for which he is too proud, is hard to watch.  Just as someone is about to drop a coin in his hand, he turns his palm over to act as if he were extending his hand to test if it were raining -- he, then, gives his hat to the dog and has Flike try to beg, crouching behind a pillar while passers-by ignore the animal.  When one of his friends sees Flike holding out the hat, the old man explains that "Flike is just playing.  He likes to play all day long."  The film is heavily sentimental and has a portentous operatic-sounding score, but it is moving nonetheless and Umberto's fierce pride, his undoing, is heroic in its own way.  The movie is lucidly shot in deep-focus black and white with very few close-ups -- the mise-en-scene is simple and reminds me of Chaplin's films, also pictures about urban poverty.  Antonioni clearly studied this film -- the movie's characteristic pictorial gesture is to pose the small, hunched figure of Umberto D against the florid Baroque architecture of Rome.  The little old man is dwarfed by the huge renaissance palaces and churches.  I value the movie most for its generosity.  De Sica isn't afraid to bring the film to a complete standstill to explore his characters' states of loneliness and despair.  A scene in which the old man is sick and tries to sleep while the noisy life of the boarding house goes on around him is poignant and powerful -- you can feel the old man's weariness in your own bones and the noises grating on him  from around the house, even a strange sound that we learn (a half hour later) is the streetcar on the thoroughfare below the boarding house, have a feverish kind of authority and are distressingly disturbing.  The best sequence in the movie is a tiny lyric interlude in which the pregnant maid, alarmed by her own condition, gets up early in the morning -- she sees a stray cat ambling over a skylight, an image right out of a canvas by Balthus, and aimlessly wanders about the kitchen, sipping water from a hose hooked to the faucet and, then, listlessly grinding some coffee.  We have seen her earlier as a kind of nemesis figure, lit dramatically by a flaring torch that she carries -- she is using the fire to kill ants that are invading the kitchen.  The girl is weirdly beautiful, of an indeterminate age, a sort of cross between the Virgin Mary and a nocturnal lemur and the scene in which we see her unease and morning routine feels like a gift to the audience.