JOURNEY TO ITALY (1954)

Roberto Rossellini knew his marriage was failing. After Ingrid Bergman shocked Hollywood—and scandalised America and her native Sweden—by eloping with the Italian director in a highly publicised affair, it was evident to many within their inner circle that the union was troubled. He was deeply possessive, refusing to let his new wife work for anyone else. Petrified she would return to Hollywood, he made a film about love’s slow death: Journey to Italy / Viaggio in Italia.

Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) are on holiday in Italy—perhaps the worst holiday of their lives. They are on their way to their luxurious holiday home, which they are in the process of selling, yet they are utterly miserable. That’s because, though they’ve been married for more than eight years, they realise that they barely know each other.

Their marriage has become a liminal space; they often communicate that they have little to no idea how they should function, feeling as though they are walking in territory that’s simultaneously boundless and claustrophobic. In the opening scene, Alex wakes up as Katherine is driving the car: “Where are we?” She seems far away, trapped in a dream. “Oh, I don’t know exactly…” They’re lost together, with no comprehension of where they are heading—and it’s beyond terrifying.

They seem uncommonly awkward for a couple of almost a decade. Their interactions are formal and mechanical. There’s no mirth in their chatting, no conviviality in their demeanour; they have become uncompassionate and detached as they engage in perfunctory conversation. A couple who are constantly busy, find themselves struck by how little time they have spent together: “This is the first time that we’ve been really alone ever since we married.”

The truth of this statement startles them both, and they each go to great lengths to be in the company of others. Katherine does this hoping to placate Alex, revealing to him: “I don’t think you’re happy when we’re alone.” He informs her that she has no idea what makes him happy… and he’s right.

That’s because they’ve become (or always were) strangers. Katherine laments how they are foreign to each other, and distant, which is perhaps the only thing that Alex can agree with her: “Yes… after eight years of marriage, it seems like we don’t know anything about each other.”

The fact that they’re alienated from their partner is a theme conveyed in many ways. They’re shown sleeping in separate beds. They disagree on almost everything. And perhaps most of all, they have no idea how the other person truly feels: “One never knows what he’s thinking…” They are little more than mysteries to each other, even after so many years.

In one scene, Katherine reveals a friendship she had with a romantic poet, who died tragically. In the ensuing conversation, we see not only that they have very different personalities, but also that they are completely incompatible: she’s in love with her deceased friend’s passion, but Alex irreverently refers to him as a fool. Katherine is possessed of an affinity for the ethereal, whereas her husband is eternally attached to the material realm.

As if the difference in worldview weren’t bad enough, Alex takes great pleasure in hurting Katherine’s feelings. To twist the knife in the wound left by the sorrowful death of her friend, he remarks on the literary quality of her friend’s demise: “How poetic… much more poetic than his verses.” He wants to hurt her because he doesn’t know how to love her, and the result is deeply saddening.

Alex continues to drive a wedge between them by overtly flirting with another woman at a dinner party. In petty revenge, Katherine intentionally subjects herself to company she doesn’t want to induce a fiery jealousy within him. Subsequently, he leaves their holiday home, picking up a prostitute on a drive through the city, right before he insults her with a smile on his face: “You shameless, brazen hussy.”

It’s his pitiful attempt to make himself feel more powerful, his pathetic, chauvinistic attempt to take back control over his own life and restore his dwindling self-assurance. But he cannot go through with his betrayal—knowing it would represent his crossing of the Rubicon, passing a point in his marriage from which there would be no return, he drops the sex worker off at her home, never consummating his treachery. Much like in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), it’s only in toying with the idea of betraying Katherine that appeals to him—he can’t actually do it.

Both of them (but especially Alex) become increasingly sarcastic and malicious, prodding and poking to get a response from the other. It appears that they would choose anything but the pervasive apathy that has come to define their marriage. They both seemingly consider that jealousy is a means to keep the passion between them alive; in some toxic, dysfunctional way, it at least demonstrates that they still care.

When Alex witnesses two fiancés bickering fiercely, with one considering the other to have been flirtatious with another person, he remarks bemusedly: “How can anyone be jealous before marriage?” It’s a line of dialogue that reveals one of the fundamental problems in his perception of marriage: he doesn’t see his wife as his friend, nor his lover, but as an emblem of status, a reflection of himself and his worth. If not that, then he’d fear losing her at any stage in their relationship, not only after they have been legally bound.

As they come to spend more time in each other’s company, their resentments grow. They complain and disagree constantly, with Katherine even exploding while in the car by herself: “I hate him… the brute!” Accusations fly, fingers point, and criticisms are bandied about; neither one of them wants to accept responsibility for the state of their marriage.“Why should I make the effort all alone?” Katherine demands. Alex snarls at her superciliously: “Because it’s your fault! The whole thing is your fault!”

First, they drink to overcome the distance that’s formed between them. Then, they drink to numb the pain of each other’s company. Both of our protagonists are filled with immense terror. They’re frightened that they’re not known by the person who should understand them best, scared that they are intolerable to the one person who should love them more than anyone. And they are horrified that they will never be able to rectify what their marriage has become: a loveless husk, without even friendship to traverse the rift that has formed between them.

Their love is a ruined castle, collapsing all around them. They both are visibly afraid that large slabs of stone will crush them at any moment—and that the other will only watch, unwilling to help. The silences, the dread of being the first to speak, and the anxiety of being made vulnerable in front of the person who ostensibly should never hurt you. There’s so little done to communicate how their life together is steadily falling apart—yet it’s completely transfixing.

That’s because love dies from small wounds. Alex makes overt gestures to demonstrate how little he cares for Katherine, not because it’s true, but because it’s his last means of defence. Meanwhile, Katherine conveys at every opportunity how independent she is without him, despite how she truly wants the pair of them to be united. Tellingly, what they both seem truly afraid of is irrevocably hurting the other; although they constantly push each other away, neither wants to go so far that their marriage would be rendered unsalvageable.

Perhaps it’s because they fear how the subsequent loneliness would swallow them whole, devour them without a second’s hesitation, and then they will be lost to it forever. One woman’s description of a house without a man reflects the primary dilemma for our protagonists: do they split from the person who is causing them such pain and misery, or do they suck it up and make the best of it? They would only choose the latter out of fear of the ensuing isolation—but they fail to notice that they are already isolated, both from each other and themselves.

All of this, the fear, the jealousy, the resentment, the awkwardness, and the sense of becoming estranged, is a mesmerising depiction of love’s slow death, a look at a union soured. As Katherine drives through the city, talking to her friend about the woeful state of her marriage, a funeral passes the car by, and she stops to look. It symbolises the demise of their life together, the period of mourning that they’re both enduring.

The film suggests this is an innate component of the human condition. As one character remarks: “We’re all shipwrecked—we have to fight to keep afloat.” Existence is compared to an island, with only love serving as a reliable means of escape from utter desolation. However, it remains clear that, as long as the pair remain together in fear, they will never truly love each other.

The achingly painful distance between the couple is highlighted by the exquisite cinematography. Enzo Serafin does a superlative job of using contrast, with some instances of chiaroscuro lighting showing the stark isolation that defines our characters. There’s also a terrific use of camera movement, with a few subtle camera pans being all that is required to capture the action onscreen.

While the cinematography is gorgeous, the audio is often quite terrible. The poor dubbing can occasionally be distracting, as are the changes in recording quality. In addition to this, the dialogue is sometimes a little weak, which is no doubt partly due to Rossellini’s filmmaking style: he would write a scene only hours before they would shoot it, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Despite this, both performers portray their characters with nothing but honesty. Ingrid Bergman, who probably never delivered a bad performance, shines in her depiction of a woman lost in a loveless marriage. Director Irvin Kershner once said: “There’s nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face.” When it comes to Bergman, he’s right; she is capable of conveying more than most actors with a mere twitch of the mouth, the tightening of her brow. She’s incredible in this film.

Her co-star George Sanders is equally commendable. Sanders, who plays much the same stuffy, elitist snob in A Shot in the Dark (1964), loathed Rossellini’s shooting style, but you couldn’t tell from his performance. A consummate professional, Sanders’ cold detachment belies intense fear and emotion, meaning his character (though rather unchanging in the film) never becomes simplistic or one-dimensional.

Perhaps more than anything, everyone behind this film—or at least Rossellini, Bergman, and Sanders—appeared to leave a part of themselves in the story. The Swedish actress and her new husband were, according to friends, equally unhappy and ended up divorcing less than three years after this film debuted. Similarly, it is strange how Alex Joyce incessantly complains about how bored he is, and less than 20 years later, Sanders would write in his suicide note: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”

It’s a harrowing instance of life imitating art. It tinges the film with an earnest melancholy, a frightful honesty. As the argumentative pair see a couple of skeletons unearthed, trapped in time after being buried in molten ashes during the eruption of Vesuvius, they are shocked into silence. As their guide reveals: “The moment they were surprised by death.”

Mortality and death are prominent themes in the story, not only because of how it reflects the creeping demise of their marriage, but because it conveys how short our time on this planet truly is, and how frivolously it is so often spent. They spend their whole lives bickering, but one day they’ll both be dead and buried, reduced to earth. All of their petty squabbles will be forgotten as they become nothing more than fossils, artefacts of a distant past.

As they walk past ancient buildings and colossal structures that frame their heartache as transient and meaningless, Katherine muses quietly: “Life is so short…” The marble statues and stone edifices have been there long before them and will remain long after them. Their internal agony will solve nothing, and both of them realise they are wasting their precious time.

So what does the future hold for them? It’s completely impossible to say for certain—human relationships are complicated. As Katherine is swept away in a crowd crush, both become terrified of losing the other, even though they have just committed themselves to a divorce. Alex says he will tell Katherine he loves her, but only on one condition: “Promise you won’t take advantage…”

To my mind, it’s a tragic ending. They claim to be devoted to each other, but they are beginning a new chapter of their relationship right where we first met them: closed off, protected, and unwilling to relinquish control. Maybe they will simply return to England, reinvigorated and content that they have overcome a nadir in their marriage. But I’m not so sure. Sometimes, I wonder if they’re merely happier to commit themselves to a lie.

Journey to Italy is cinema at its most personal, art at its most unabashedly revealing. It was immensely influential, paving the way for the likes of Antonioni’s ‘Trilogy on Modernity and its Discontents’, as well as the harrowing Don’t Look Now (1973). Other films preoccupied with modern isolation, such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and American Beauty (1999), owe a great debt to Rossellini’s masterpiece.

But perhaps most intriguingly, it’s a film that reveals more about the moment you are in than it does of the characters onscreen. What have you experienced in life? Can you connect to the solemn, unflinching depiction of heartache and, God forbid, see yourself in it? The reason why Journey to Italy remains such a powerful film 70 years later isn’t just because it’s a stunning portrayal of marital anguish and internal suffering, but because it’s a mirror. It’s for this reason it’s so difficult to look away, no matter how hard you try.

ITALY • FRANCE | 1954 | 105 MINUTES (ITALY) • 88 MINUTES (FRANCE) • 80 MINUTES (USA) • 70 MINUTES (UK) | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • ITALIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Roberto Rossellini.
writers: Vitaliano Brancati & Roberto Rossellini (based on the novel ‘Duo’ by Colette).
starring: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer & Paul Muller.