Our hearts have reason to rejoice. It's the first time providence has made us useful to others.It appears that some kind of penance is in order. After spending the week before Thanksgiving chasing down the racy liaisons of La Ronde, and the holiday weekend itself bathed in the exploitive, titillating glare of Variety Lights, I now turn my attention to that epitome of chaste humility and benevolent virtue, St. Francis of Assisi. Quite a dramatic switch, you must be thinking, coming from such opposite ends of the moral spectrum - what can these movies possibly have in common? Well, Variety Lights and The Flowers of St. Francis share a significant link - the creative involvement of Federico Fellini, who co-directed the former and co-wrote the screenplay of the latter. This is the second time in the films of 1950 that I've run across such a close coincidence of the same person being involved with two consecutive films in this series of reviews (the other being Jean Cocteau with Orpheus and Les Enfants Terribles.) Fellini's involvement with the conflicting, if not outright contradictory, subject matter in both films serves to elevate the tawdriness of Variety Lights' backstage fleshpots while helping to humanize and make accessible to us ordinary mortals the iconic, ethereal and otherworldly Francis, the renunciate monk who walked in perfect communion with God and nature. Perhaps the motivating impulses and core values of the two films are not as incompatible as they might appear on first glance.
Regardless of Fellini's role, the driving force behind The Flowers of St. Francis is Roberto Rossellini, central figure of the Italian neorealism movement whose influence and reputation with filmmakers far exceeded his commercial success. Though this film is Rossellini's first entry into the Criterion Collection (both chronologically and in order of DVD release) his most famous works, the War Trilogy films Rome: Open City, Paisan and Germany: Year Zero, preceded The Flowers of St. Francis and would have been helpful for me to view in preparation for this one. Unfortunately, those DVDs won't be released until 2010 so it will be awhile before I get to see them. So no more from me about how this film fits into Rossellini's career development - the links to other reviews can offer you more along those lines.
Taken on its own terms then, The Flowers of St. Francis first of all struck me as surprisingly non-commercial and refreshingly unsentimental. Filmed in Italy in 1950, a year declared as a Jubilee by the Roman Catholic Church, the choice of St. Francis as a subject for film biography seemed to make popular sense. Francis is one of those religious figures who carries universal appeal, even to the non-religious or to those of other faiths. His simple way of life, generosity of spirit and apparent lack of preoccupation with the divisive sticking points of doctrine and systematic theology make him pretty easy to like. His reputation for gentility, compassion for the poor and outcast, and tender reverence for animals and the environment have made him a favorite over the centuries with any number of "back to nature" movements. This film clip, from Franco Zeffirelli's 1972 Brother Sun, Sister Moon, portrays Francis along the lines of a blissed-out, "high on life" hippie lovechild. Lord spare us from this film ever getting the Criterion treatment!
I'm happy to say that Rossellini's version avoids all of the mistakes that make this clip such a long, ponderous, eye-roll inducing 8 minute stretch of YouTube - even though I have to admit a certain crazy pleasure I got from watching this relic from those early years of the Me Decade. Sad to say, but the excesses of emotional manipulation and blatant corniness indulged in by Zeffirelli are the norm for religious epics, going back as far as Cecil B. DeMille (whose The King of Kings was reviewed favorably here for its classical rendering of the Jesus story but is still guilty as charged) right on up through Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Here, however, we have a Francis who is presented as human and believable, largely because he's portrayed mostly as a man among his fellows who's made some choices and lives contentedly within the limits he's imposed on himself. The landscapes upon which they frolic, particularly in the earlier sections of the film, are so bereft of any sign of human civilization, other than a few basic, functional structures, as to appear almost other-worldly. Rossellini's neorealist principles preclude the use of sentimental music, lush landscapes, ornate visual effects or the casting of model-perfect beautiful young people to ramp up the sex appeal. And his episodic, illustrative story-telling method is probably the most important aspect of what makes this film unique, and therefore effective, in conveying a genuinely spiritual and inspiring message to its viewers. The simple, straightforward approach taken by Rossellini, incorporating humor and maintaining a consistent lightness of touch, presents to us a way of living that can at least inform how we consider others in our day-to-day affairs, even if the monastic ideal seems hopelessly impractical and unrealistic for the great majority of us. This short clip of Francis saying his famous prayer ("Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...") compares quite favorably to the more extravagant production sampled above, without conceding anything in terms of beauty or affection for Francis the man:
The other great thing that sets this film apart, besides the lack of a conventional biographical narrative that would have diminished the film's impact, is Rossellini's casting of non-actors in all but one of the roles. Their lack of affectation, and apparent openness to following directions and simply inhabiting their roles, works wonders in helping us grasp that Francis and his earliest disciples were real people who accomplished something quite extraordinary in this world. Francis and his companions are played by monks that Rossellini met while filming Paisan in 1944. He describes, in the DVD liner notes, how he was deeply moved by their joyful simplicity, which led him to consider making this film about Francis. He also cast a local village beggar, nicknamed "Red Nose" for his drinking habits, as Giovanni, a going-senile old man who wanders into the brothers' midst one day accompanied by the family ox, which he intends to bestow as a gift to Francis. His family quickly appears in hot pursuit, anxious that Grandpa is about to give away their livelihood. After Francis fills them in on the situation, they hastily depart with the ox and leave Grandpa in Francis' care. This kind of simple humor infuses The Flowers of St. Francis (or as the Italian more correctly translates, Francis, God's Jester) from start to finish, though it never upstages the more pious moments to the point it becomes farcical or disrespectful. Indeed, the essence of Franciscan spirituality that Rossellini sought to convey was how it blended a deep and heartfelt humility with self-effacing silliness. O that more films dealing with spiritual topics would dare to point out the essential absurdity that rests at the heart of such expressions! Luis Bunuel seems best to me at capturing this quality, but we're some distance from dealing with any of his films here, so I'll leave it at that.
After Giovanni is introduced, he and one of Francis' original followers, Brother Ginepro, take increasingly prominent roles in the film. Both fondly regarded, even by their fellows, as guileless simpletons, their concrete literalism and blindness to social cues also create mild headaches for Francis and the others. Ginepro's generosity leads him to give away his tunic to anyone who asks for alms, and Giovanni disrupts a solemn prayer service between Francis and his female counterpart Clare when the brothers borrow his cape to clothe Ginepro's nakedness. When they're both assigned duties to cook food and tend the encampment while the rest are out preaching in the nearby villages, Ginepro comes up with a nutty idea to cook up all of their food at once in a big stew so that he and Giovanni can go out preaching also. Eventually, Ginepro takes it upon himself to visit the camp of a local warlord, Nicolaio, who's band of thugs are laying siege to a nearby city. Ginepro approaches these hardcore warriors with supreme naivete, eager to share his gospel with them, only to get manhandled in a most astonishing way - especially considering that no special effects were involved in getting these shots! Finally, he is brought into the heavily-armored presence of the big boss man himself. Aldo Fabrizi, the comic actor who plays the despot, is that lone professional cast by Rossellini, and some have critiqued his broad-gestured mugging for the camera. These two clips let you see what I'm talking about:
It's a shame that clip #2 doesn't go a few seconds longer, because there's a great shot of the mild-mannered Ginepro striding into the camera, with flaming ruins and billowing smoke behind him - an ironic though unintended juxtaposition of today's action movie cliche' featuring heroes (or anti-heroes, as the case may be) making the same walk with huge fireballs exploding in the background.
Even without the benefit of English subtitles, I think the point comes through clearly enough: nonviolent resistance has a power to provoke change in ways that violent means cannot achieve.
I think the scene works overall, though I can understand those who don't like the way it disrupts the calm pastorale of the film's first hour. The episode comes fairly late in the film, and marks a transition from the rustic timelessness in which we first see the Franciscan commune into a world more recognizably our own (or at least, an ancestral version of it.) After Ginepro reunites with his brothers, Francis comes into contact with real-world violence and realizes that their cloistered golden age must end. They must face the task of taking their message back out into the world. This concluding scene provides a comical Great Commission in which the followers of Francis trust their leader to embark on a path dictated by the whims of their dizziness:
In my personal hierarchy of spiritual role models, Francis ranks pretty high up there, though I have to admit it's based less on close study of his life and more on his image - enhanced quite a bit by this DVD, which I've owned since it was first released back in 2005. It's so quiet, so serene, so uninterested in "grabbing" the viewer through the usual movie tricks that it took me a bit of getting used to before I could appreciate it, or even stay awakhole time! The episodes depicted in this film are supposedly faithful renditions of ae the wnecdotes passed down by tradition and captured in some of the earliest writings about Francis and his peers. The Flowers of St. Francis is a film for which the label "canonical" fits in more ways than one.
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