The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 16-22
The Visit (1963)
Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli
Killed at the age of forty-nine in a freak swimming accident while on site filming, Antonio Pietrangeli was at the height of his game, tweaking so-called Neo-Realism with humor, humility, and a camera-eye all his own, his oeuvre wildly consistent in content, focusing specifically on inequality and the inability for women to adapt to a radically changing nation. The Visit might be the most comedic of films on view in this retrospective. Seemingly via a singles newspaper page, Pina and Adolfo have been sending each other letters, getting to know one another. The Roman, a lame bookseller, Adolfo, visits Pina in the country to meet in person with strong potential to be man and wife, and it’s immediately clear he’s not content with her ways of living. He despises her pets (consisting of a lazy dog, a turtle, and a talking bird that mocks him), he hates the door chimes, he moves furniture to make the place more suitable for himself, and to top it off, he’s more attracted to the granddaughter of the housekeeper, repeatedly inquires about monetary stature, and gets embarrassingly drunk. This relationship is certainly not going to survive, and it is Pietrangeli’s portrait of a nation wherein even the most well-to-do are deemed forever alone. Samuel T. Adams (December 16, 4:30pm at MoMA’s Pietrangeli retrospective)