I do not know if I am delirious, but living in a country that has an enclave called the Vatican (in a certain way, a spiritual "Canal Zone", as the area that was under US control within the republic of Panamá until 1999) must predispose Italian artists: perhaps the Vatican inspires the most pious to exalt Catholicism, while the most progressive maybe take a more critical stance towards this ecclesiastical state-enterprise within their country. I find quite curious that two Italian non-believers and filmmakers, one Marxist and the other atheist, made two of the most interesting films I have seen about the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. First, Pier Paolo Pasolini, released in 1964 «The Gospel According to Matthew», a production that was surrounded by a controversy that finally turned into applause and praise; and the other, Roberto Rossellini, presented «Il Messia» in 1975 with less luck, to the point that the free circulation of the product had to wait almost 30 years to be (marginally) distributed. «The Messiah» is long, Brechtian, austere and intelligent; it dispenses with many biblical passages in which David W. Griffith, Miguel Morayta, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens, Franco Zeffirelli, Martin Scorsese or Mel Gibson delighted in their (kind of frivolous) versions of the Nazarene's immolation; and it introduces the story in an ingenious way: the film starts with a synthesis of the history of the Jewish people, from the arrival of the tribes to the "promised land", after 40 years in the desert, to the selection of Saul as their first king, who led the common man to war; and then proceeds with a description of the growing political and moral corruption of the tribes, a process that reached a "plot point" the day the expected Messiah appeared. As the story goes, they ended up turning their backs on the holy man and murdered him. Rossellini does not shilly-shally: he cleverly exposes the political intrigue of Pharisees and Jewish priests, who try to preserve their power without disturbing the Roman invaders that control them. Jesus is young and strong, somewhat shy, he works wood, ploughs and gleans, has mystical outbursts, preaches with metaphors to death, and knows how to debate with logical reasoning. The most difficult part of the film is the long sequence of the apostles' proselytizing campaign, as they preach the "new word", but that is the director's choice. Rossellini prefers that, to show us instead the brutal and the violent, in the best aesthetic line of a Greek tragedy, which showed not tortures, crimes or mutilations on stage. «The Messiah» saves us the lashes, the road to Golgotha, the long agony on the cross, and the miracles. The film has another agenda: to show the story of a man who confronted the corruption of power, who preached love as method, but who was paid with hatred by his own people. Rossellini does it in a realistic way, he shows things as natural and non-dramatized facts (often in long shots, with few cuts or none); the images lose that false fervor of "saint cards" that has ruined so many films about Jesus. As an example, see the sequence of the last supper, from the moment Jesus washes the apostles' feet to Judas' departure. It is just that, a last meal, a sad farewell and the leader's final instructions, and not an ornate evocation of the first Eucharist. Roberto Rossellini was not an improvised filmmaker: he is the father of Italian neo- realism, a brilliant light in the history of cinema, whose trilogy of war («Rome, Open City», «Paisá» and «Germany, Year Zero») marked the birth of contemporary cinema. He was an innovator who took melodrama to the limit in his films with Ingrid Bergman, the love of his life, in «Stromboli, Land of God,» «Europe 51» or «Voyage to Italy,» and a visionary who joined the practice of television, a medium that he glimpsed as the audiovisual future of the planet. «Il Messia» is not a sole spiritual work in his oeuvre. It also includes the portrait of Francis of Assisi in his film «Francesco, Jester of God» (1950) and the TV mini-series «Acts of the Apostles» (1969), which suggests that atheists can also be sensitive to genuine religious people.
Review of The Messiah
