A Film Canon

If Rossellini locates the common denominator between Christianity and neorealism in humanism, Miracle In Milan locates it in their shared dedication to the naive, incredulous and, above all, wondrous gaze of the child, turning on Toto (Francesco Golisano), an idiosyncratic saviour who is immaculately conceived in an aging spinster's cabbage patch, leaves home at eighteen to help an impoverished shanty-town improve and defend itself against those business interests that would transform it into an oil field and, when the latter fails, ascends with his followers on broomsticks over Milan Cathedral, to the film's hymn, "That's all we need to believe in tomorrow". What redeems this from bland sentimentality is De Sica's generalisation of childhood to a mimetic, rather than chronological, phenomenon; a tendency to repeat, imitate and quantify actions that finds expression as a proliferation of mystical-numerical analogies, motifs and nuances, all of which which both encompass and repel the businessmen that they are pitted against, clarifying that the characterisation of capitalists as eccentrics who just need to be taken - and even appreciated - as such, is both seductive and fundamentally misleading. Similarly, De Sica consistently couches the fantasy-world of the shanty-town within the expansive, exurban bleakness that surrounds it, as well as deflecting the carnivalesque tone through the most modest, humble, even banal spectacles - from the chicken that the community lotteries off, to the sunsets that cost a lira to watch - which are, in turn, memorably defamiliarised, anticipating Umberto D.