Review of Open City (2008) by Timothy S — 08 Apr 2008

My favourite out of all of Rossellini's uneven career. "Rome: Open City" almost explodes with an exhuberance and a sense of real horror that would have been impossible to capture had the film been made even a year later. Alongside "Army Of Shadows" and "Soldier Of Orange" this may be the finest film ever to tackle the idea of what it meant to be a resistance fighter in World War Two, the performances here do not feel so much like excercises in acting as excorcisms, with the players all being people who really did suffer under the insane rule of the Fascists just a year before. This movie is their therapy.

I can't review this movie without discussing the astonishing Anna Magnani's amazing effort in this picture. Her face is a book out of which we read the true suffering and terror that slaughter and chaos bring to the human mind. How some things that are broken cannot be remade.

An epic of humanism and one of the finest and most beatiful and compelling arguments against man causing pain to man that I have ever witnessed.