Christ Stopped at Eboli

Viewing Christ Stopped at Eboli, from 1979, reinforced my feeling that director Francesco Rosi is the most underrated of the postwar Italian masters, at least in this country. There are many reasons for this. When the film premiered in New York in early 1980, it was in a truncated form. The nearly four hour original had been shown in segments on Italian television. The film has enough bravura sequences to well earn its length. The long tracking shot of field working peasants reacting to Mussolini's announcement of victory over Ethiopia sums up the dual themes of love for beleaguered Southern Italy and revulsion at Italy's ages long attraction to fascism. 

This is the crux of the film's source material, Primo Levi's novel. Rosi and his collaborators fashioned a fairly faithful version of the novel. The mini-series format allows Rosi enough amplitude and time to capture the breadth and pace of life in the boot of Italy. The protagonist, a thinly disguised version of Levi, has been exiled to an obscure and crumbling burg because of unspecified transgressions against the regime. Carlo Levi, as he is named, is a doctor who has never practiced, but the populace have been stuck with two quacks and they swiftly enlist Levi as their medical savior. Gian Maria Volonte, Rosi's usual leading man in the 70s, soulfully portrays Levi as a sensitive type who responds to the locals' close connection to the natural cycles of existence. He wins them over with quiet assurance and an understanding of the efficacy of the placebo effect.

The ravaged beauty of rural Italy is the real star of the picture, as in Rosi's 1962 masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano. The only real rival to Rosi as a portrayer of the Italian landscape was Antonioni who used his backdrops to picture urban alienation as opposed to Rosi's rural desolation. A shot of fog lifting from the town is as ravishing as anything in cinema. The beauty here is always a stark one because the sun baked Italy Rosi pictures is impoverished by the taxing dictates of Rome. The peasantry endure and it is their example of stoic resistance and humility that Levi takes with him when his exile is ended.

Rosi gets in his digs at the Black Shirts, but stops short of the comic grotesqueries of a Fellini. The film only falters in the last quarter when speeches too baldly enunciate the film's themes, a flaw shared by Rosi's equally superb Cadaveri eccellenti. A sequence where Levi teaches the town's children painting is also misjudged, perhaps because Rosi wanted a sentimental counterpoint to the pig castration sequence.

The theme of exile is predominant in both the novel and film of Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title refers to the boot of Italy, a region ridden with superstition and calumny, being untouched by Christianity. Within the populace are sub-communities of exiles: the educated elite, returnees from America, and the exiled prisoners of fascism who are forbidden to commingle. The theme of exile was common in the postwar existential wave of fiction, especially Camus' The Plague and "Exile and the Kingdom". Once the golden glow of childhood discovery fades, we are forever in exile across a dark plain, cast out of paradise for all eternity. Christ Stopped at Eboli is a beacon amidst a vast wasteland.