Cinderella and the Welfare State

WHEN WILLIAM POWELL. Boston brahmin dropout from the purposeless life of the idle rich reveals at the end of La Cava's My Man Godtrey that his idea of how to cure Depression America's woes is to build nightclubs staffed by the unemployed, the letdown we feel is the characteristic failure of. Hollywood comedies about social problems. Throughout the film. Powell describes the injustice of a system which permits the callous extravagance of the society families he serves as butler, yet when the smoke clears the flowing champagne on Sulton Place drowns the social' criticism which gave the film its force. In the late Vittorio De Sica's final film. A Brief Vacation, we experience a similar tantalizing disappointment, as the director offers sentimental solutions which fail to engage the problems he presents so sharply, the complex plight of working women.

Set in a grey-working-class suburb of Milan. A Brief Vacation is the temporary escape illness provides for Clara (Florinda Balkan) from the crushing situation in which she is trapped. While her husband recovers from an industrial accident. Clara must support him, their two small children, his senile mother, and his shiftless brother. On her feet all day holding an acetylenc torch in a metals plant. Clara spends the rest of her time running the household. If she doesn't change a sick child's bandage or decide whether the dinner eggplant should be sliced or diced it doesn't get done since no one else in the family is willing or able to help her. The last vestiges of the love for which Clara and her brutish husband (Renato Salvatori) married back in the southern countryside have vanished in the North, along with their hopes for a better life--shattered by poverty, overcrowding, and discrimination. All that remains is the grotesque stereotype of Italian machismo--burlesqued so successfully in The Seduction of Mimi-- in which a wife is a precious possession to be ignored until another man's interest provokes savage jealousy.

For Clara, however, this stereotype is her whole life. Ordinarily, resigned self-abnegation directs all her energies towards her family: she even brings home to her husband the lone slice of meat she receives for lunch at the factory. But when the strain of exhaustion and isolation becomes too powerful. Clara explodes into directionless rage and paroxysms of tears, set off by such poignant frustrations as her family's failure to set her alarm clock, making her late for work. No trace of individuality graces this stark portrait of women's oppression, so that while the helplessness and despair of Clara's position emerge with didactic clarity, her pliable, anonymous features do not hold any of the pathos which might convey the urgency of her plight.

EVENTUALLY, CLARA COLLAPSES at work; the doctor diagnoses incipient T.B. and prescribes six months at a government sanitorium in the mountains. In a prise de conscience precipitated by her husband's violent jealousy and his insistence that she sleep with him despite her illness, Clara realizes that if she doesn't look after her needs no one else will and goes off to the mountains in the face of her family's adamant disapproval. The sanitorium itself is a welfare state Magic Mountain, set in Alpine grandeur that enables De Sica to display the saccharine cinematography that made his Garden of the Finzi Contins such a visually attractive but intellectually vapid film Snow capped mountains, exquisitely dressed women, luxurious but tasteful architecture and rustic charm proclaim heavyhandedly that we have entered another world totally alien to Clara's seedy three room tenement and grimy factory. Here Clara has everything she has been denied all her life, a room of her own, time to herself, wealthy girlfriends to lavish clothes on her and teach her how to be a lady men to admire her. This topsy-turvey world works an instant transformation on Clara. The haggard lines painted on her face disappear overnight and with them the shabby working-class hausfrau; in her place stands an elegant fashion plate who abandons her peasant taciturnity for sparkling wit and high spirits, reads Anna Karenina and 1 Prontessi Spossi, swoons to romantic violin concerti and discovers that she has no desire ever to return to her coarse proletarian family.

To complete the process of regaining her humanity. Clara falls in love at first sight with a graceful young man. Luigi (Daniel Quenaud), whose cardboard sensitivity and self-indulgent acting make him an ersatz Prince Charming. This love affair is brief and passionate, but unconsummated for the spell is abruptly broken by Clara's cure, which inexorably returns her to obligations at home. As the train hurtling southward nears Milan, the skies darken with thunderclouds, gracelessly symbolizing the descent from ethereal realms of sweetness and light into the quotidian agonies of proletarian life.

SUCH AN EXERCISE in grand tragedy is difficult to take seriously, however, when none of the characters avoids two-dimensional typicality. Clara, particularly, as the martyred Working Woman, displays ludicrous malleability in her metamorphosis from Cinderella to Princess at the caprice of the plot. All the romantic music, charming mountain cafes, melting glances and scenic forest idylls De Sica produces cannot lend authenticity to this melodrama, so that the inevitable denouncement is devoid of pathos.

As an example of liberation for working-class women. Clara's change in consciousness is hopelessly ambiguous. On the one hand. Clara has realized clearly how she has been victimized and dehumanized at home in Milan: on the other her new perspective depends not on a fresh understanding forged through her own efforts, but on a stroke of fortune that momentarily allows her to escape the prison of her class. Not only is her enthusiastic reception by the wealthy women at the sanitorium and her effortless shift of identity unrealistic, but there is no more substantial self- awareness in her new personality than in the old, notwithstanding the director's apparent intentions. Her love affair is surely no more profound and emotionally fulfilling a relationship than her marriage, as she simply embraces the first man who appears to be everything her husband is not: refined, tender, clean, skilled. Northern Italian, and sexless. Clara has merely exchanged docile acceptance of her place in the home for the equally passive but more glamorous image of middle-class femininity, hoping to pick up dignity and culture with the furs and cosmetics she acquires from her new friends. Here De Sica's uncritical portrait of Clara's new consciousness falsifies the very concern for working women's problems that animates the film, much as the finale in My Man Godfrey negates Powell's indignation at the rich and powerful. For us the tragedy lies not in Clara's failure to escape the grueling routine of scullery and assembly line through a pipe dream, but in her failure to learn anything which might help her change it when she returns.

THE INTERESTING ASPECT of Clara's metamorphosis, and indeed of the whole fantasy of escape into aristocratic elegance which comprises the central theme of the film, is that this is precisely the sort of ambivalent and delusory self-consciousness we might expect a woman in her situation to have: the easiest exit from the drudgery and stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate Madame Bovary's romantic illusions. A Brief Vacation might have been a penetrating analysis of the obstacles that inhibit working women's emancipation. Because it founders in its heroine's false consciousness instead the film is most realistic where it is least perceptive, as its unintended ironies subvert any sympathy it might provoke Ultimately, Clara's oppression in Milan and her liberation at the sanitorium are equally tendentious and one-sided set pieces, whose juxtaposition has all the elegance of a double feature of The Home Life of the Toiling Masses and Gidget Goes to Paris.