A Film Canon

 

 

As the title suggests, this film identifies itself with a child's gaze, using the complications that arise between little Prico's (Luciano de Ambrosis) mother (Isa Pola) and father (Emilio Cigoli) as the mere pretext for a vision of the world on the verge of sensory-motor integration; or, alternatively, a series of social lessons (about guilt, betrayal, isolation) as the pretext for a series of sensory-motor lessons (learning to ride a bike, recognising that walking down a railway track can produce sudden, treacherous bursts of disorienting sound and movement). To this end, De Sica's most poetic achievement is imbuing the adult world with the very sensory-motor distortion, or discrepancy, that it would seek to project upon children, such that its inhabitants ultimately feel like so many versions of the Punch and Judy show that opens the narrative - from Prico's aunt, who has to be carried around in a chair, to one of her patrons, who desperately squeezes herself into a tight-fitting corset, to the inhabitants of his bourgeois apartment building, who agree to reduce the communal elevator to a one-way system, for the purpose of saving power. It's this bodily approach that makes De Sica the greatest director of children, as he 'plays' de Ambrosis in much the same way as the doctor checking his reflexes, such that a single tear, or the words 'Mama' and 'Papa', carry the weight of an entire existence, clarifying the extent to which his American counterparts are simply small adults, and creating an almost unbearable pathos.