A Film Canon

Bitter Rice plays like an uneasy fusion of neorealism and proto-sexploitation, ostensibly documenting the emergence of revolutionary consciousness amongst a population of female rice pickers, but ultimately subordinating it to their visceral proximity, and the voyeuristic pleasures to which it gives rise; or, alternatively, offering an idiosyncratic take on that moment in the dialectic at which the inanimate becomes animated under the impulse of this consciousness, by depicting women in the process of becoming aware of their bodies, and forcing the viewer to do the same. Most immediately, this takes the form of the steamy romantic complications between two men - Walter, a soldier (Raf Vallone) and Marco, a gangster (Vittorio Gassman) - and their respective women - Silvana, a rice picker (Silvana Mangana) and Francesca, a petty thief (Doris Dowling) - all of which centre on Silvana's sultry, iconic dance, and eventually segue into a series of equally visceral - if slightly ridiculous - acts of violence, culminating with two particularly brutal images of impalement. More generally - and impressively - De Santis takes advantage of the partially submerged rice fields to imbue the pickers' movement through it with a sensuous viscosity, transforming the 'crowd' from an abstraction to a palpable, plastic reality, and, at its most poetic, rendering it indistinguishable from the various fluid dynamics that occur in and around this space, including the extended storm sequence of the second act, Marco's attempt to sabotage the crop by opening the sluices to full capacity, the mounds of rice kept in storage and, ultimately, De Santis' elaborate camera-work itself, which displays a sufficiently ingenious use of vertical pans, tracking-shots and wide, long vantage points to give a full sense of the extraordinary quantity of non-professional female actors involved, as well as subtly identify itself with the omniscient, erotic sadism of the plantation wardens.