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the audience applauded

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

"Paisa", Roberto Rosselini's chronicles of the Allies' Italian campaign, is a movie like no movie I saw and like no one has ever seen when it came out in 1946. It is really one of a kind, a masterpiece that stood the test of time and it's no wonder Martin Scorsese put it at the top of his favorite movies.The film is made of six episodes following not only a chronological but geographical story line. The first episode is set the very day the Allies landed in Sicily, their first one in the European continent, in that crucial summer 1943. Sicily marked the beginning of the end for Nazis but what a nightmarish, thrilling and inspirational journey before getting to that triumphant end. Each episode of "Paisa" ('buddy' in Italian) is set in a specific city: Rome, Napoli or Florence, but it's less in the setting that in the variety of situations that the experience of war is so unique and groundbreaking. For instance, most war movies involve ordinary battles, bridges or railroads to blow, towns to free, prisoners to handle and so forth, but "Paisa" explores in a deeper way situations we generally take for granted. A film like "Patton" shows us the Allies entering in Sicily, but in "Paisa", we're confronted to the first patrols, meeting defiant villagers with the language gap playing a significant part. The most memorable relationship of this segment involves a GI named Joe, from New Jersey and local Carmela, a Sicilian girl who reluctantly guided his patrol to an unoccupied castle through a mine-free way.The first shades of genius start to show through the communications struggles between two persons who couldn't have been more opposite, yet are united by similar desires: she wants to see her parents, he wants to go home, and when he finally finds a way to communicate, and just when you think we're about to have a love-at-first sight moment, something happens that shows you how war has never been much of a plot-maker, and one way leading to another, after five minutes, with the closing of the first chapter, we're haunted by the story's poignant irony, and we're looking forward to witness similarly humanistic tales. Naturally, they are not of the same emotional resonance, as there's no specific pattern guiding the stories, but all through the film, our hearts swing between contradictory emotions: warmth, humor, anger, sadness and shocks through the outburst of violence, reminding us there's a war, after all.The second and third chapters are the first to feature non-life threatening situations, one deals with the unlikely relationship between Joe, an African-American soldier, and a little street scamp who reminded me of the 'Shoeshine" kids (actually, the story has something to do with shoes) but it's so unlike the first one that we're a bit puzzled before getting the emotional implications of its ending. The third chapter is interesting too in the way it takes place in the aftermath of liberated towns, and plays like an ironic twist on the typical images of pretty girls kissing their liberators. Indeed, the disillusion caused by war ends up affecting 'innocent' girls. Of course, when compared to killings or rapes, prostitution strikes as the lesser of two evils, but the story again, defies all the conventional implications of a love story, quickly sacrificed on the altar of war's inner sleaziness. The following episodes are more in line with the usual war material, especially the fourth one featuring an American nurse and an Italian resistant running through Florence in the midst of a ferocious battle between Italian partisans, Nazis and their die-hard fascist allies, in a desperate quest to find their loved ones, her lover, a legendary resistant named 'Lupo' and his family. The ending echoes the Sicilian chapter. Finally, the last one is perhaps the grittiest and ugliest, but a necessity when you consider the anti-war statement the film makes: partisans, who are seen in previous chapters are mercilessly shot by the Germans on the basis that they are not covered by the Geneva conventions, their execution is not without protests, nor sanctions to these protests. The film questions the pretensions of civilization, how can civilization orders destruction, killings, how can it destroy human feelings such as life and love. Which leads me to the most puzzling chapter, where three American chaplains are welcomed to stay in a Roman monastery. It's a place of peace and quietness and for a while, it seems that there is nothing but mutual respect and gratitude between the men, until the monks learn that two chaplains happen to be Jewish and protestant, lost souls as they say. Indeed, at a time where humanity lost its soul, literally, where war has proved to be the anti-thesis of civilization, the monks' reactions is simply perplexing. I don't think there was any anti-religious undertone to it (remember the heroic priest who prayed for an atheist Communist in "Rome, Open City") but more of a way to show how ironically lost, the men who never really got in touch with war, ended up being. This is one of the many ironies, the brilliant, multi-layered and Oscar-nominated screenplay is full of. And this is to the credit of Roberto Rosselini and the six writers, including Fellini, who made these chapters, to have assembled these slices of Italian and American lives at a time where Italy was trying to restore some of its lost dignity. And a film like "Paisa" is a powerful homage to the souls that were either killed or destroyed by war. On a technical point, some images get a bit blurry, some actors are less professional than others, but it is so obvious that most of the film was shot like a documentary, that these flaws are small prices to pay for such a historical magnitude, this is as far as neo-realism could ever go.

Rosselini's epic which attempts to guide us through the lives of several people through the WWII era. In this drama, we see the corruptions and successes that come with war, and how some of the smaller stories that play into the grand epic of war are normally be quite tragic. Rosselini brushes over the aggregate picture of war, so that we may delve deeper into these individual stories as a way of portraying a more caustic reality. His goal seems to inspire emotion whether at be insipid or unjust, rather than simply focusing on the glory, and pageantry that goes into the process. In this way, we see how he was truly a pioneer of the neorealist genre. A genre that focus on trying to extract a truer story, so that the trials and tribulations of the average man may not be lost among the kistch-iness.. so that these people don't become simply memorials, but individuals that created it.Although this wasn't my effort movie in the war genre, I can certainly appreciate the aesthetic and narrative impression that Rossellini has made on film. While watching this movie, I began to see parallels to modern war epics, such as Saving Private Ryan, Windtalkers and Inglorious Basterds. The one see that sticks out to me is the scene inglorious Basterds where they are simply having fun ruthlessly murdering German soldiers. Of course, Tarantino provides a sort of fantasy world for this to take place in. The effort is still interesting and I believe pays homage to movies like this. I also found Rosselini's connection to Ingrid Bergman quite interesting. Although stylistically, they are not exactly alike, there are certain elements that can be seen in both films. I do not know whether they were together at the time of this movie, but that parallel is still unique.

Early in the film, the girl from the church who guides the Americans sounds just like the girl from Godfather II who Michael marries while hiding in Sicily. They're both young and Sicilian. If it were just their voices, I could never tell the difference. Not just voice, but their attitude and demeanor are the same. I've never been to Sicily, but this seems to confirm what a young Sicilian woman sounds like. This authenticity really adds to the goal of Italian neo-realism; the goal of capturing real human behavior and shying away from an actor's "fake" portrayal.Rossellini uses actors and non-actors in the film. It is difficult to separate the two. I think I can safely say all the characters with no dialogue are non-actors. They are extras, hired, dressed (maybe in their own clothing), and placed where need be. The rest with dialogue are harder to distinguish as either actor or non-actor. All the lines seem to be delivered in an amateur way. Even those that may be actors seem to make efforts to seem as stiff and natural and real as would a non-actor appear to be. Close-ups may be the only give away. And this is not always sure. There is a close-up of the Sicilian girl that really shows her emotion and deliberation of what she is about to do. Again, am I deceived? Is she actor or non-actor? At this point, it seems not to matter except for the fact that all the characters are seamlessly woven into the story. There are none who give an obvious performance. There are none who stick out or are identifiable were it not for the credits, which I don't pay attention to anyways. What remains is praise for Rossellini's vision and execution.

I'd caught snippets of this over the years but settled in recently to watch it from beginning to end. It's a turn off at first. The images are grainy, the budget could crawl under a duck's belly, to borrow a trope, and the gestures towards professional acting are perfunctory, especially in the case of the non-Italians. On top of that -- and here I'm thinking of today's kids -- the whole thing is in black and white, there's not a recognizable face on the screen, and there are plenty of SUBTITLES. Enough to make any young person weaned on remakes of remakes, filled with computer-generated effects, weep with abandon.But if you stick with it, you are drawn into the six vignettes as, one by one, they spell out the travails of Italian citizens and partisans in the course of the Italian campaign, from Sicily to the Po. And half the dialog is actually in English.The contents of the six episodes are spelled out elsewhere -- the plot summary, for instance, so there's no real reason to go over them again. Each carries some sort of existential lesson. The German soldiers may kill Carmela but the American soldiers blame her for a comrade's death. People misunderstand one another out of carelessness or lack of effort.The African-American GI may be thoroughly browned off when a street urchin steals his boots, but when he follows the kid home to retrieve them, and sees the miserable conditions under which the orphan's neighbors live, he drops the shoes and walks off, perhaps a little ashamed at having complained of his own poverty at home.The most enlightening (and the funniest) episode involves three American chaplains visiting an ancient monastery in Northern Italy. The otherworldly monks quietly welcome the American visitors and use the gifts the GIs brought with them to prepare a feast in their honor -- or rather what passes for a feast in a bleak and barely post-war monastery. At prayer, only one of the chaplains participates, the one who speaks Italian. One of the monks asks why the other two didn't pray and the chaplain explains that one is a Protestant and the other a Jew. A dog, a panic in a pagoda! The monks have heard of Protestantism and Judaism but have never set eyes on any exemplars. They scurry around like mice, spreading the word, responding in mixed ways, but in the end deciding to forgo their participation in the elaborate dinner. They will fast while their guests eat, hoping that by this small sacrifice the two unbelievers will some day see the light and achieve salvation. The Catholic chaplain makes a short speech explaining that the other two are among his dearest friends but that he has learned the true meaning of faith during his brief time at the monastery. The episode ends on this ambiguous (and grown-up) note.The last episode ends tragically, a downbeat climax that one wishes had contained some note of hope.Put up with the lack of money and the clumsy performances and let's see if we can learn something too.