Miracle in Milan

 Released in 1951, Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan depicts an urban landscape that is ruinous and still in the shadow of the second world war.  The film exploits a vein of whimsy and sentiment that will not be to everyone's taste.  Indeed, I found the movie too saccharine with some scenes that made me cringe a bit -- the sentiment is over-the-top and, therefore, seems forced.  But the picture's heart is in the right place and it is extraordinarily imaginative.  The set design and location work is indelible.  Ned Mann, an American, was hired to manage the film's many special effects -- the results are serviceable but unconvincing. In tone and with respect to its "magic realism", a concept that the picture prefigures,  Miracle in Milan resembles some of the similarly lavish movies made in Britian by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, most particularly A Matter of Life and Death. Pressburger and Powell are in better control of their poetic special effects (they work in the studio whereas De Sica seems committed to filming on location) and the camera tricks seem merely perfunctory in De Sica's film.  Miracle in Milan is a particular favorite with Isabella Rossellini, sufficient endorsement, I think, for anyone.  It's notoriously hard to portray goodness and happiness on film -- the medium thrives on violence and discontent.  De Sica makes an effort at devising a movie about contemporary affairs that isn't cynical and that espouses a faith in the virtue of the common man -- he's not wholly successful, but the effort is worth commending and the picture deserves to be seen for its beautiful and startling photography. 

Toto, the film's hero, is a young man who materializes mysteriously as a wailing infant in a cabbage patch.  (The film self-consciously invokes fairy tales and folk proverbs -- the title sequence shows us the names of the performers emblazoned across a detail from Brueghel's painting embodying northern European proverbs.)  A kindly old woman raises him.  She is very gentle.  When she finds Toto boiling some substance so that the pot has drained foam all over the floor of their small cottage, she sets up toy trees and little animals next to the greasy spill and pretends that it is a river.  When he is eleven, the old woman dies.  Toto walks behind the hearse drawn by a tired-looking dray horse.  The hearse traverses a ghastly-looking urban wasteland of vacant lots, foggy lanes leading into the mist whirling around garbage heaps.  As they trudge to the cemetery, an escaped prisoner joins Toto's dogged march behind the hearse and escapes in that way -- it's a scene that seems redolent of Chaplin.  Toto is deposited in an orphanage.  Seven or eight years later, he's released, now a chubby boy with short arms and legs and a square-cut blocky head and shoulders.  (Toto played by Francesco Golisano is charismatic, but ugly -- he looks like a member of the lumpenproletariat and doesn't have the features of a leading man.  He was selected for his ordinary, everyman appearance, worked in about eight or nine films all in the course of two years and was retired from the film industry by 1952.)  Emerging from the orphanage, Toto is very polite and friendly.  He says "good morning" to everyone he meets, earning the inevitable scornful response that the morning isn't "good" and only a moron would characterize it that way.  At a street accident where a crowd is gathered, Toto puts down his valise and it is taken by a thief.  Toto chases the man and confronts him; the poor guy is desperate and Toto lets him keep the briefcase. It's cold with snow falling and Toto with the thief goes to a dismal vacant lot next to the railroad tracks.  The two men spend the night in a casket-like shack, just a cardboard box.  Other slumdwellers are living in the shadow of the railroad tracks in wretched tubes and tents of cardboard and scrap metal.  When the sun rises, a few beams descend onto the muddy plain and the slumdwellers run as quick as they can to the places outlined by the sunlight to enjoy a moment of warmth.  The homeless encampment is utterly squalid and the ruins look like the aftermath of some sort of terrible battle.  A great gale sweeps over the swampy wasteland and tears the slumdweller's huts apart.  But Toto is a kind of leader and he encourages the slum dwellers to erect larger, more elaborate squatter's huts on the muddy plain.  Ultimately, a small village is constructed on the site complete with named streets, plazas and a central square decorated by a disfigured sculpture of a ballerina.  A couple of rich men come and one of them sells the premises to the other, a tycoon named Mommi.  Mommi doesn't know what to do with the shantytown and so he leaves it alone.  Unfortunately, when the slumdwellers are erecting a maypole, it hits water, creating big geysers that decorate the grey skies and fog over the village.  The water is laden with oil and, sometimes, bursts into flame.  Of course, the oil field discovered beside the railroad tracks elicits the attention of Mommi.  Mommi decides to expel the squatters so he can exploit the oil under the village.  Led by the gentle, but stubborn, Toto, the villagers resist.  A  deputation goes to Mommi's fascist-style offices (it's full of bellicose life-size statues) and pleads with the mogul to leave the shantytown in peace.  But this petition fails and platoons of Keystone Kop-style gendarmes and national guardsmen are sent to expel the shantytown residents from the site.  At this point, the titular "miracle" or "miracles" ensue -- the spirit of Toto's kindly mother floats down from the sky.  She gives Toto a white dove that grants wishes.  There are two scrawny angels in leotards who look very gay -- they are like something out of Cocteau's Orpheus films.  The angels play the role of periodically withdrawing the magical dove from the shanty town dwellers.  A series of slapstick skirmishes ensues -- when Mommi orders his goons to attack, they start singing opera arias and can't advance.  When firehoses are deployed against the squatters, a thousand impermeable umbrellas materialize.  The villagers discover that the dove will grant their wishes as well and the slumdwellers ask for fur coats, millions of dollars, and luxuries like chandeliers -- one tiny little man (he's four feet tall) asks to be made larger.  The villagers begin competing for useless frills and the angels appear to snatch away the magical dove.  Mommi's thugs attack again and this time load all the slumdwellers into paddy wagons, driving them downtown to the bleak square next to the hulking porcupine of the Milan Cathedral.  Toto's girlfriend, Edvige, grabs a dove from a chicken coop and gives it to Toto -- he wishes on the little bird, although it's not the bliss-bestowing fowl.  The paddy wagons burst apart and the squatters seize the brooms of workers sweeping the square, levitating into the air and, then, flying over the cathedral toward the sun while singing a chorus about the brotherhood of man.  

The movie plays like Bertolt Brecht refracted through Grimm's fairy tales, particularly Philip Runge's extravagant "The Fisherman and his Wife", a story about the pitfalls of having all your wishes, even the most frivolous, granted.  The slumdwellers have vivid faces and make a menacing mob.  The shantytown is one of moviedom's most pungent and enthralling sets -- it's constructed of cardboard and corrugated metal all fused together and the premises, consisting of quixotic towers and ramparts, is decorated by big flares of oil bursting in clear jets out of the ground.  There are innumerable tiny details and neorealist touches.  A Black GI pining for an Italian woman asks the dove to be made white.  No sooner is this accomplished than the man's girlfriend appears -- she has asked to be made Black.  The film loops back to its beginning with a final title:  the slumdwellers are building a world in which the salutation "Good Morning" will mean that the morning is truly good.  De Sica's longtime screenwriter Cesare Zavattini constructed the story -- Zavattini was a Communist and, of course, the political aspects of the story represent a sort of benign "folk-communism."  The grim landscapes and bleak vistas of Milan are depicted with fantastic conviction so that the quixotic and whimsical aspects of the plot are in a continuous dialogue with gritty neo-realist photography.  The picture doesn't entirely work but its optimism doesn't seem opportunistic -- it arises from a struggle with gruesome circumstances that the film depicts with authority.