Visconti’s "Roco and His Brothers" has the shadow of the director’s early neo-realist works ("The Earth Was Fluctuating", "Sinking"), but it also shows the great epic melodramas that followed him ( "Leopard"). The nearly three-hour movie revolves around the Rocco family—mother and five sons—moving to live in Milan from the countryside of southern Italy. From the structure of the film divided into five segments according to the names of the five Roco brothers and the three-hour duration, it can be seen that Visconti’s original intention really wanted to express the greatness of the environment (the city life in Milan) to the character and psychology of the characters. Influence, to show the great changes in Italian social life after the war. However, compared to the epic poem of "The Grapes of Wrath" that shows farmers entering the city, the social environment of Milan in "Roco" is always in a fuzzy state. The audience felt that Visconti seemed to unconsciously make the story "inside" and that social tragedy became a psychological tragedy.
The central part of the story of "Roco" is the emotional entanglement between the two brothers Simon and Roco (starring Alan Delon) and the dusty woman Nadia. Simon met Nadia when he won the boxing championship, who soon became his girlfriend. Simon fell very fast, drunk, lustful, pretentious, and stealing, and Nadia left him soon after. Two years later, Roco accidentally ran into Nadia while serving in a barracks, and the two fell in love. The jealous Simon couldn't accept the fact that his ex-girlfriend and his younger brother were combined, and decided to retaliate wildly. On one night, he rushed to the place where they were dating with a group of friends and dogs, raped Nadia in front of Roco, and beat Roco hard, but the latter hardly fought back. Afterwards, Rocco asked Nadia to return to Simon for the sake of brotherhood. Nadia was completely desperate from then on, and finally was killed by Simon after a verbal exchange.
Whether it is the opportunistic characteristics of the boxer profession, the temptation of urban life in Milan (the characters in the film repeatedly poeticize their hometown, as if the heterogeneous city is the source of their misfortune), even Nadia’s abandonment cannot explain The root cause of Simon's fall can only be said to be an external inducement. Simon in the movie has a rough, uncivilized face and a cold and conceited expression. The audience can faintly feel that the evil in his heart is surging. In him, there is a prototype of Cain, the first human murderer. As a rationally incomplete animal expelled from the Garden of Eden, humans are always in danger of falling into complete evil, and in the non-Christian context of this movie (Visconti is a communist), this evil There is no hope of redemption: whether it is his initial arrogance or his final weakness, the audience's feeling for Simon this character is only uncontrollable nausea and disgust.
Compared to Simon, Roco is the real tragic character. He is not a saint, but a man who puts the idea of brotherhood unity above all values. He gave up Nadia for the sake of brotherhood, shouldered huge debts for Simon, and even covered Simon's murder. The motive of all these sacrifices can be explained by what he said to his little brother Luca at the end of the film: "Remember that mason? When he started building a house, he would throw a stone on the shadow of the first pedestrian passing by," "In order to make a house strong, someone had to make sacrifices." Rocco’s tragedy is an Antigone-style tragedy, a tragedy caused by a conflict between different principles of justice in a person’s heart. But the tragedy of the whole movie is not so close to Sophocles as it is more of Euripides. The tragedy of "Roco and His Brothers" does not have a sense of sublime, but a psychological tragedy of a group of characters swayed by moral concepts and desires.
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