Review of Paisa (2013) by Ryan M — 21 Jun 2010
Roberto Rossellini followed up to his acclaimed war tragedy "Open City" with "Paisan", another multilingual neorealist film dealing with the impacts of war, albeit in a less conventional but highly expressive form.
Told as a series of six unrelated vignettes concerning working class Italians and Allied soldiers during the liberation of Italy, "Paisan" presents the horror of war as a product of our inability to understand each other.
Language barriers are a deadly obstacle here, and even those with the strength and heart to overcome it seemed doomed by the rest of the world's nearsightedness. The episodic structure of the film unfortunately stunts our emotional engagement.
It's hard to feel for characters we don't even get a chance to properly know (and are poorly acted to be perfectly honest), but by the end of the picture this emotional void is filled by the statement these six mini-movies make as a whole; a lingering damnation and lamentation of our society's hopelessness.
This review of Paisa (2013) was written by Ryan M on 21 Jun 2010.
Paisa has generally received positive reviews.
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