FILM REVIEW; ROEREND GOED And LADY OF MILAN
Roerend Goed is a darkling landscape that guides the viewer step by hypnotic step through his own subsurface pathologies. One believes the film is in black and white, but now and then, with a start, one is surprised to note that a tulip is red. Obviously, the importance of a scene is played up only when there is a flash of color. Artistic mummery? Perhaps. Originality, certainly, else the whole world would mimic the classic work of Soviet director Vsevolod Pudovkin. Also too clear would be uneasy kinship with the 1928 Salvador Dali-Luis Bunuel masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou. With Roerend Goed, director Frederik Nutteloos imprints is own style.
For example, Pieter (played by Christiaan Zeeman, who vaporized his rivals for the Platinum Ribbon with his work in the stunning Scheeps Makelaar) is overtaken by an urge to travel. He takes off his skates. The blades hiss—the ice curls—and he quickly dwindles to a black polka dot at the end of the endless ice canal. The impact of Place is striking. One realizes Aha! this is Holland.
That evening in his kitchen (it is dark, sooty, and there is a sense of seething emotion) he tiptoes up behind his wife Kati (Margrit Groot), whispers that he has been to the end of the world. For a camera’s heartbeat, she does not respond. It is a nice moment. Director Nutteloos knows this, for he keeps focused on the famous blond head. Then, slowly, so we hear the fine bones in her neck crackle in our own heads, the famous blond head turns. She faces Pieter at last, and pronounces words that stop him—and us—in his tracks. “The tulips are in.” That’s all. She has transformed her familiar whispery voice to a gravelly boom: “The tulips are in.”
Nutteloos interrupts, sends the camera meandering through their small sod hut, exposing to us the tools of their lives: a wooden bucket, milk pans, coal tongs, and, heartbreakingly, a child’s stocking draped—thrown? no, forgotten—across the arm of a rocking chair. The clue is only a ruse, for Pieter and Kati have no children. But they have a grandfather—either Pieter’s or Kati’s—who says little, but power is plain on the weathered face. Nutteloos has coaxed Rolf van der Hoogh to come out of retirement to do this cameo bit, and it is evident that his presence on screen is undiminished by age.
The ice-bound marriage slowly dissolves into pathetic random puddles. The climax occurs at the long-awaited tulip festival. Pieter and Kati have drunk and they dance the tulip-clog ritual. The camera pans back suddenly, tipping us to the important action. Kati dances toward Pieter, heaps her backsack of tulips onto Pieter’s outthrust arms—outthrust in beseechment—and walks out the door. Seen plainly on Pieter’s face is realization of his ultimate biodegradation. One weeps with him. Before she disappears, Kati’s famous blond head turns a tiny 15 degrees. Did she look back? One couldn’t be certain, even through a second screening.
The charming Carlo Contadino in Lady of Milan has a few more seams in his handsome face. He relies more and more on eloquent shrugs for acting expression, but is somehow convincing in this farce about his pursuit of Milanese billionaires Gianna (played by Pina Pancuccolo). Director Franco Strano takes a chance in breaking away from the earthy south and setting his film in northern Italy, in a center of commerce at that. Having no Gold of Naples caricatures to rely upon (who could forget Sophia Loren in that picture, with all the squalor and soul of that city?), nor resort to the south’s whimsical interpretations of ending the immutable bond of marriage, Strano nonetheless makes a tour de force of a fresh medium. His study of bankers, oil tycoons, board chairmen (one or two are women, though Strano plays his little joke on us by making us guess) engrosses us in the study of chilliness of northern Italians.
Strano has found humor, or even pathos, on the stock exchange floor. An old woman peddling violets in the midst of shouting brokers is cunningly parlaying her savings into millions. The espresso boy has just lost his old mother’s farm. Carlo’s perspiring face and shrugging shoulders transmit the hysterical reboundings of the market. At the same time, cleverly overlaid by Strano’s trickery, he is seeing Gianna in her negligee at the tickertape platform. Stock market and lust are inextricably intertwined. The metaphor cannot be missed.
Pancuccolo as Gianna gives us a new perspective of an actress renowned for her portrayals of baker’s wife, brothelkeeper, playboy’s mistress. Her performance in Cobblestone Fantasies when she was but 20 years old remains unforgettable. But in Lady of Milan Pancuccolo is metamorphosed. She is regal, austere, yet uncorrupted by wealth. Her style, at first striking one as unsympathetic (she gives off an erotic aura only while studying her stock portfolio on horseback), eventually proves that money is love, love is lust, and lust is money.
Carlo breaks into her reveries by galloping alongside and rudely murmuring stock quotations to her horse, ignoring Gianna. Piqued, she is challenged, and forgets all about business.
Carlo eventually gets Gianna, though at the last minute (one is not quite giving away the ending), she does a sly about-face and transfers her fortune to her three illegitimate children. Canny director Strano. Throughout the film he had us believe the three were her groom, stockbroker, and housemaid.
In this final twist, Strano clearly attempts an alliance with the art of his old master, Vittorio De Sica, that grand master of heartwarming skill. ###
