Firsts
It is vital that you start the year with the right book and movie combination. The wrong choices won’t necessarily ruin your next twelve months, but they won’t get you thrilled about the possibilities, either.
On New Year’s Eve, amid the fireworks, I watched Rocco and His Brothers (1960), directed by Luchino Visconti. It’s about five brothers who leave their dirt-poor village in southern Italy to try to make a decent living in Milan. They endure great hardship, their small-town values are corrupted by big-city greed, and their mother (Katina Paxinou) overacts everyone off the screen. Good brother Rocco (Alain Delon as an Italian Alyosha Karamazov) and bad brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) both fall in love with the prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot), leading to one of the most melodramatic sequences in cinema. The movie is often overwrought and histrionic, but its grandeur is unshaken even when the brothers, wailing and leaking tears and snot, fall on each other like an operatic rugby team.
In this movie Alain Delon is so beautiful, I expect everyone he meets to shriek and cross themselves. Visconti puts that beautiful face in the boxing ring to be bruised and bloodied: the struggle to survive in the city is a literal violation. I suspect Rocco and His Brothers was a major influence on the movies of Lino Brocka.
According to Bernard-Henri Not Levy, Rocco and His Brothers and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which came out the same year, were SRO box office hits at the Ever Theatre on Avenida Rizal. It helped that both were condemned by the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency.
First book read in 2009: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. It is a heartwarming philosophical discourse—sounds weird but it is possible—on the power of art to elevate lives. There are two narrators who hide their true natures. Outwardly not much happens, but inside they’re whirling. The first narrator, the 54-year-old concierge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, describes herself as ugly, short, cranky, and typical. It’s all an act: she’s one of the most beautiful characters in recent fiction.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 26th, 2009 at 14:34
Hi Jessica. This is a long shot but are you willing to sell me your copy of The elegance of the hedgehog? I just moved out of the house I grew up in and im in dire need of good books to keep me entertained sans TV and music. It’s sold out in all Fully Booked Branches, special order at NBS and the staff at powerbooks have never heard of it. :( Please? Thank you.