If I had the power to re-release Italian movies, there are at least 300 I’d go through before I got to The Wide Blue Road, the 1957 debut of director Gillo Pontecorvo. I don’t have that power, but someone else does, so here, courtesy of Jonathan Demme (who saw it at a retrospective and fell in love with it), is this long-neglected curiosity, an awkward but attractive film with a nice loping pessimism, a macho Yves Montand, ample beauties of sea and sky, and a deep hatred of capitalism.
Pontecorvo’s reputation rests on two late-’60s left-wing films, The Battle of Algiers, which is widely admired but little seen, and Burn!, starring Brando, which is little seen and less admired. The Wide Blue Road has little in common with the director’s later works or indeed with anything else; seeing it is like going to a museum and finding a room containing a single unexplained piece.
The film takes place on a Sardinian archipelago where the fishermen are at the mercy of a capitalist with a refrigerator who buys their sardines for derisory prices. Only Squarciò (Yves Montand) makes a decent living, because only he is willing to fish with dynamite, risking blowing himself up or getting caught by the coast guard. His wife (Alida Valli) wants him to put away his bombs and switch back to a net, and his friends want him to join their nascent cooperative, but he keeps heading for disaster in full lucidity.
A Marxist who was converted to cinema by neo-realism, Pontecorvo said that the ideal director would be three-fourths Rossellini and one-fourth Eisenstein. The Wide Blue Road resembles neither of these models. The island setting and the use of fishermen as characters give the film a vaguely neo-realist quality (to the same extent that the presence of burritos at a 7-Eleven gives it the quality of a Mexican restaurant), but Pontecorvo seems as uninterested in fishing as Squarciò is (the bombs are a short cut, a way of avoiding routine). In the scenes of Squarciò making his bombs, Pontecorvo cross-cuts, à la Hitchcock, between Squarciò’s face and what his hands are doing. This implied abstraction of physical activity from essential being would be out of the question for Rossellini, and it’s equally far from Eisenstein’s dynamizations of labor power.
Shot in splendid Technicolor, the film has a dry, refreshing compositional correctness and a way of alluding to natural grandeur rather than wallowing in it. The storytelling is plain: nothing happens without having been set up at least one scene in advance, and Pontecorvo isn’t above using voiceovers to fill in the blanks. Squarciò’s wife, though she anchors Pontecorvo’s most inspired shots, hardly exists as a person; he keeps his characters and their relationships schematic and functional.
Yet what keeps the movie bland also makes it interesting: its meek, intellectualized ambivalence. Pontecorvo acquiesces in Montand’s charisma, so that, finally, he can’t make the movie he probably wanted to make, a movie that would have needed a more brutal type (somebody more like Francisco Rabal, who’s buried here in the role of Squarciò’s friend). But at the same time he’s reluctant to let the film just be Squarciò’s personal tragedy. A socialist treatment of the story would have thrown its weight behind the other fishermen and given shorter shrift to Squarciò’s soul struggling. A Rossellinian treatment would have deepened Squarciò’s isolation (like that of the Ingrid Bergman character in Stromboli) until it became the reflection of a world.
Pontecorvo ends up instead with something weirder: socialist realism with a bad conscience. He almost comes out and says that Squarciò is right to fish with bombs because fishing is a miserable way to earn a living and the faster he can get it over with the better, that what causes Squarciò’s downfall is less his own guilt over losing his integrity than the condemnation of the community, and that this condemnation hurts not because the community is so terrific (the fishermen are written and played as a bunch of simps) but because it’s the only community there is. The Wide Blue Road finally explains little even as it seems to explain too much, and it’s the more likable for that.
