Ossessione

Plot

Gino Costa, a wandering tramp, stops at a small roadside tavern and petrol station in the Po Valley, run by Giovanna Bragana and her older husband, Giuseppe. Giovanna is disgusted by her husband, having married him only for his money, and is instantly drawn to the younger and more attractive Gino. Giovanna serves Gino a meal, but they are interrupted by Giuseppe, who throws Gino out. Giovanna claims Gino did not pay, pocketing his money, as an excuse for him to return. Giuseppe chases after Gino, only to find that Gino has no money left, so Gino offers to fix Giuseppe's vehicle as payment for the meal, and the two bond over shared military service as Bersaglieri.

When Giuseppe leaves to pick up a part for the vehicle, Gino and Giovanna confess their feelings to each other and begin an affair. Giuseppe, completely oblivious to the situation, takes a liking to Gino and tells him that he can stay and help out around the tavern. After a few days, Gino tries to convince Giovanna to run away with him. Giovanna initially agrees, but on the way to the train station she changes her mind and refuses to go through with it, so Gino leaves without her.

While Gino is on the train, he is confronted by the ticket inspector and admits that he has neither a ticket nor money. "Lo Spagnolo" ("The Spaniard"), a traveling street entertainer, steps in to pay for his train ticket and the two become friends. When they reach the city of Ancona, Gino spends a night at an inn with Spagnolo, where he reveals that he cannot stop thinking about Giovanna. When Spagnolo learns that Giovanna refuses to leave her husband because she fears having no money and security, he advises Gino to "run far away" and forget about Giovanna. Later that night, Spagnolo lights a cigarette and holds the match up in the dark bedroom to watch Gino while he sleeps.

Gino stays in Ancona and gets a job holding up an advertisement sign for Spagnolo. One day, Giuseppe and Giovanna run into Gino by chance, and the three go to a bar where Giuseppe sings in a voice competition. While he is on stage, Gino confesses to Giovanna that he tried to forget her but could not and tries again to convince her to leave with him. Even though Giovanna still has feelings for Gino, she refuses and tells him that she will stay with her husband, to which he angrily replies, "Then I'll come back to the store. Is that what you want?"

After the voice competition, Gino, Giuseppe, and Giovanna leave together to return to the Braganas' tavern. Giuseppe has been celebrating his successful singing performance and is quite drunk. Gino and Giovanna take advantage of his inebriated state and conspire to murder him. They convince Giuseppe to let Gino drive and stage the murder as a traffic accident.

Production

Background

Working under the censorship of the Fascist Italian government, Visconti encountered problems with the production even before filming commenced. He had initially wanted to adapt a story by Giovanni Verga, the Italian realist writer and one of his greatest influences, but that project was turned down almost immediately by the Fascist authorities due to its subject matter, which revolved around bandits. Around this time, Visconti uncovered a French translation of The Postman Always Rings Twice that had been given to him by French director Jean Renoir while he was working in France in the 1930s.

Development and writing

Visconti adapted the novel with a group of men he selected from the Milanese magazine Cinema, which was edited by Vittorio Mussolini, Benito Mussolini's son. The members of this group were talented filmmakers and writers and played a large role in the emerging neorealist movement: Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli, and Giuseppe De Santis. Many of the Cinema crew were open or covert antifascists, a fact both the older and younger Mussolini tolerated under the belief their presence was necessary for the Italian film industry to innovate and compete with its rivals elsewhere, so long as their politics did not overtly affect the content of their films. Several of the Cinema alumni, including Visconti, would later go underground and join the resistance.

Filming

Ossessione was filmed between the summer and autumn of 1942. The exteriors were shot on-location in and around the Po Valley and the commune of Ferrara. Filming locations included the settlements of Codigoro, Ancona, Comacchio and Boretto. The interiors were shot at S.A.F.A. Studios in Rome.

Analysis

For the most part, Visconti retained the plot of the novel. He made changes such as tailoring the script to its Italian setting and adding a character (Lo Spagnolo), but the main departure from the novel and the defining characteristic of the film is the manner in which it confronts the realities of life.

Despite arguments about how to define neorealist cinema, certainly one of Ossessione's most poignant aspects is its stark realism and, despite being popular actors of Italian cinema, the stars of the film, Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai, deliver breathtaking performances that are anything but glamorous. In one particularly memorable scene that anticipates a major theme of neorealism, Giovanna, Ossessione's central female character, enters her wildly messy kitchen, serves herself a bowl of soup and sits down with a newspaper, only to fall asleep, slumped over wearily in the midst of the confusion. At several moments like this one, Visconti slows the pace to give the viewer an even more penetrating glimpse into the routine of his characters and, in doing so, roots the narrative squarely in the life of his characters.

In another scene, Gino, Giovanna, and Giuseppe are eating when Giuseppe comments that a local landowner has been shot from behind by a worker, believed to be the result of the worker's love for the landowner's wife. In this way, Visconti foreshadows the man's own death and illuminates the study of class tension that is woven fluidly into the film. Soon afterwards, Giuseppe submits to his wife's physical and verbal responses to cats crying outside and fetches his shotgun and leaves. Shortly after his exit, the adulterous lovers huddle close and hear gunshots, thereby hinting at the doom also reserved for the lovers "in heat".

The landscape itself is realistic, and Visconti takes great care to situate his characters in a rural Italy that remains for the most part unromanticized. Nearly the entire story is told using medium and long shots, with Visconti choosing to employ close-ups only at moments of intense emotion. Characters are depicted interacting with and moving around within their environment; to help create this effect, Visconti favors long and ponderous shots, while making use of depth of focus to highlight the variety of action occurring throughout the space of the frame. He resists identifying solely with one character and prefers instead to maintain a distance, taking them all in with his viewfinder as independent, but irrevocably tangled, components of a larger cast, which includes the sets, scenery, and landscape, as well as what goes on outside of the frame. Shots of the landscape largely consist of the dusty road winding into the distance and the interior shots are just as bleak; the dowdy kitchen exudes a nearly tangible film of dust and grime and the dingy hotel room that speaks, with each detail, of the rebellious freedom cherished by those who share it.

Release and reception

Fascist reaction and ban

When Ossessione was completed and released in 1943, it was far from the innocent murder mystery the authorities had expected; after a few screenings in Rome and northern Italy, which prompted outraged reactions from Fascist and Church authorities, the film was banned by the Fascist government that had been reestablished in the German-occupied part of Italy after the September 1943 armistice. Eventually, the Fascists destroyed the film, but Visconti managed to keep a duplicate negative from which all existing prints have been made.

Post-war

After the war, Ossessione encountered more problems with mass distribution, both because Visconti had never obtained the rights to adapt Cain's novel as a result of the wartime production schedule and because Metro-Goldwyn Mayer produced an adaptation directed by Tay Garnett while the Fascist ban on Visconti's work was still in effect. Due to the copyright issues, the film was not released in the United States until 1976, but, despite the limited number of screenings, it was still able to gain acclaim among moviegoers who recognized in it some of the same sensibilities they had grown familiar with in neorealist films by Michaelangelo Antonioni, Puccini, and De Santis, among others.