neither circle nor square
by
Douglas Messerli
Julius
J. Epstein (screenplay, based on the fiction by Elizabeth Spencer), Guy Green
(director) Light in the Piazza / 1962
Yesterday
afternoon, for the 3rd or 4th time, I again saw on the
TCM television channel, Guy Green’s 1962 film, Light in the Piazza,
based on the short novel by Elizabeth Spencer. One of my favorite film guides, Time
Out Film, described it as “a terrible film.”
Now having seen it several times, and
having experienced the enlightened musical by Craig Lucas and Adam Guttel, I’m
not at all sure I’d totally agree.
True that the late career actress Olivia de
Havilland seems to be more of menace than the loving, almost over-doting mother
she is supposed to be. It’s almost as if she got a bit confused and played a
version of Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte a couple of years before it’s
premier. And Rossano Brazzi has perhaps already seduced too many American
innocents such as Katherine Hepburn in Summertime and Jean Peters,
before that film, in Three Coins in the Fountain. And despite his
generally credible performance as a young wealthy Italian, George Hamilton, is still
a bit of a stretch. And I must admit, I find it really difficult to believe the
often overwrought Yvette Mimieux is truly intellectually challenged, let alone
mentally retarded.
Yet,
like Hepburn’s Summertime one is seduced by the Italian (in this case Florence
landscape), as are the characters. The young Clara Johnson, despite her stated
role as a mentally challenged young girl of 26 is absolutely in love in life,
ready to learn a new language (and far more successfully than I might have done
at that age), and who falls in love, most naturally, with an equally youthful
23-year-old (and perhaps just as mentally challenged) youg Italian, Fabrizio
Naccarelli. There is absolutely no way to part them, even though both Meg
Johnson and Signor Naccarelli at various junctures attempt to.
These young people, as confused,
bewitched, and bewildered as all young people in love, simply cannot keep their
hands off of one another. And their love infuses them with a power that no
matter how protective either of their families are, destined for one another;
despite even a devious detour to Rome, where Meg meets up with her delinquent business
husband, Noel (Barry Sullivan), determined to derail any future for his
daughter—and one might argue his wife—no one, not even their over-protective
parents, can stop it.
Even Meg perceives that in a loving
Italian family, where her daughter might be embedded in familial affection,
ignoring her eternally young enthusiasms, she might be protected and loved.
And, it appears that her would-be lover Fabrizio is just as innocent and lost
in into a romantic world of which he has no knowledge of reality. But then, isn’t
that what love is truly all about? Young people in love are all Claras and
Fabrizios, having absolutely no idea of where are going given their own lack of
mental facilities. The “mental retardancy” of which the film hints is always
what love is about.
Although this film doesn’t explore it as
it should, Clara’s mother Meg is just as confused and off-kilter as her young
daughter is. After all, Brazzi has always stirred up deep emotions in unloved
older women (and not so older) that takes them to places they might never have
imagined. Unfortunately, de Havilland doesn’t quite go there. Her stirred-up
emotions goes no further than an argument with her unloving husband that it
might be better to protect her daughter by giving her hand in marriage than
speaking the truth about her mental inabilities.
The truly wonderful thing about this film
is that we never for a moment really believe that Clara is truly incompetent.
She learns languages, she enthusiastically embraces love; what can be wrong with
her? The only problem that Italians can conceive is that she is older than they
thought. At 26 is she a good catch for their 20 (actually 23)-year old son?
Even the temporarily outraged Signor
Naccarelli perceives that they are destined to be together, she eternally young
and innocent to receive the equally innocent love of his younger son.
This is not a film about a mentally-retarded
girl quickly married off to a wealthy Italian family, but the story about all
of youthful love, of how confusing and utterly astounding love really is. No,
this is not a “terrible movie,” unless you read it quite literally. This is a
film about children finding their way through the maze of definitions, of
strictures, wrong perceptions, and labels put upon them by the equally confused
adults around them. In their love perhaps the adults might find a way to redeem
their own lives.
In the end, the piazza is neither quite
a circle nor a square, but an arcaded gallery where love can find cover.
Los
Angeles, June 3, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2019).
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