Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men (Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity. I made her what she is today may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani-the sexy-maternal, working-class Roman-is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.” Hard to believe-her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the binds of script and taking her costars with her. Mi raccomando, eh?-uffa!-per carità!-abbia pazienza!-O dio mio!-come no?-meno male! Italian is a language packed with verbal fillers . Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving each woman just what they need-smile or insult-in order to let her pass. In front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry. Blasetti: “But I said the child has to be six or seven years old, not less… she looks a bit small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.” The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts adoration and contempt. All women are artificial. All women are, in the end, actresses. Womanhood itself is an act! But Magnani turns the proposition on its head. She is the incarnation of that paradoxical imperative: act natural. She is always and everywhere apparently without artifice, spontaneous, just another Roman woman come tutte. Which leads to a strange conclusion: the actor isn’t acting-the character is acting. For isn’t it Maddalena , and not Magnani, who puts on a bit of an act now and then, when circumstances call for it?

One morning an eccentric acting teacher approaches the family. She wants to give little Maria lessons that Maddalena can’t afford. Alone in her bedroom, Maddalena considers the offer, combing her unruly hair and addressing her own reflection in the mirror: “To act… after all, what is acting? If I imagined to be somebody else… if I pretended to be somebody else… I’d be acting… But you can act… You’re my daughter and you can become an actress. You really can. I could have, too, if I had wanted to.”

With Magnani, womanhood is utterly real-it simply does what it must to get by.

Much Italian cinema revolves around the classic Italian philosophical problem: blonde or brunette? For Fellini, the answer was, usually, both. Antonioni solved the dilemma on an abstract intellectual plane by discovering Monica Vitti, the blonde with the face of a brunette. In Visconti’s Bellissima no counterweight is put up against black-haired Anna Magnani, for what counterweight could there possibly be? Her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) has the elemental, hulking beauty his name implies (a nonactor, he was picked out by the director’s assistant, a young Zeffirelli, from a crowd of bone merchants in a Roman slaughterhouse). But in character, in personality, he is no match for her. He is left to plot weakly with his mother against her (“Mamma, I won’t even bother with her. She always does what she likes anyway!”), though only for the length of a lunchtime, as he eats the meals his mother still cooks for him. He seeks no real alternative to Magnani.

Bellissima is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in a female movie star can hardly be imagined.

In the parrucchiere where little Maria is taken for a haircut:

Hairdresser:( to Maddalena ) I could give you a good style, too.

Maddalena:Don’t even try, no one has managed that.

Hairdresser:I could manage.

Maddalena:( laughing ) You’d waste your time!

Like Davis and Crawford, Magnani is an unconventional beauty. Unlike them, she is beautiful without any cosmetic effort whatsoever, and moreover, without any interest in the cosmetic. Cosmetic beauty is not the type that attracts her.

To wit: in the courtyard of her grim casa popolare, [64] projected on a giant makeshift screen, a Hollywood blockbuster plays. Maddalena watches, enraptured. Spartaco comes to retrieve her:

Spartaco:Maddalena, leave the cinema alone.

Maddalena:Oh, Spartaco, you don’t understand me. Look at those beautiful things, look at where we live. When I see these things…

Spartaco:Maddalena, it’s a fantasy.

Maddalena:It’s not!

We might expect to see up there Rita Hayworth in Gilda, peeling off those silk elbow-length gloves. But it is Howard Hawks’s Red River, a wild open plain, two cowboys on their horses. The object of Maddalena’s desire, a herd of bulls crossing a creek.

The chorus of mothers gossip among themselves. The rumor is that so-and-so has a recommendation of iron (“He was saying how pretty the girl was… but he was looking at her mother!” “Ah, now I understand!” “That’s how it is these days!”); the fix is in; the auditions are worthless-it has all already been decided. A typical Roman inside job. Something must be done: they’ll unite to complain, it’s a vergogna, they’ll confront the producer! However, upon consideration, a more attractive, less violent, solution is found: each woman will look to her own recommendation. For one lady’s husband knows the director of the phone company (“What does that matter?” asks Maddalena. The reply: “He’s important ”); someone else’s husband has a friend on set; yet another has a Cinecittà waiter in her family.

And Maddalena knows Annovazzi. They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy. “I never come here!” she says, for there exists a Roman life that does not include and never comes near the expats of Monti, or the Forum, the Pantheon, or even the Colosseum. The pair walk to a tree and lean against it like lovers. Annovazzi plays the cynic: “We’re so used to recommendations, both to making and receiving them… In Italy we rely on recommendations: ‘Please don’t forget.’ ‘I assure you.’ ‘I promise you.’… But who are we supposed to remember and why?” The only safe thing, he concludes, is to “put the person who needs your help in a position to ask for that help.”

He strokes her arm, offering her the possibility of the sexual favor instead of the financial. She removes his hand, laughing. “No, this way is much better.” He takes her fifty thousand lire, supposedly to smooth the ground for Maria, in the form of small favors (“A bunch of flowers to the producer of the film, a bottle of perfume for the lover of the producer”). In the event he will spend it on a Lambretta for himself.