Una donna libera (1954) is a film of many facets. Firstly, it is a study of the emancipation and liberation of women. Liana works, and she rejects stable and conventional sentimental ties; something that today might seem banal, but which at the time was daring and unusual. We may find a similar situation in La proie pour l’ombre (1961): but Alexandre Astruc’s film seems rather verbose, abstract, theoretical, idealist. There are also some points in common with the Antonioni of La signora senza camelie (1953) and Le amiche (1959); but Antonioni de-dramatizes, while Cottafavi overdramatizes.
A woman who has a job, other than working as housekeeper: a situation that is becoming commonplace in post-1945 Italy. Liana is an architect, and she is convinced professional success is more important than sentimental life. But things aren’t that easy. In this prestigious professional field, careers start with unsatisfactory jobs, copies of the projects of others, the mere decoration of apartments, professional relations that often become mere pretext for sexual activity: a rather disappointing beginning. Liana’s sentimental life, at the end of the day, turns out to be a series of failures. Influenced by a seducer, Liana breaks up with the man in her life, also an architect, after a two-year engagement; the woman realizes her existence risks becoming monotonous, without surprises, following a path already traced all the way up to old age, like her parents’ life. Liana believes she has found true love with a Don Juan, Gerardo, a well-known orchestra conductor, but pretty soon she realizes she’s wrong: Gerardo enjoys passing from one woman to the next, to then maybe return to the first after some time, just for a while, when he feels like it. In Paris, the woman rejects the offer she gets from an influential older architect. Then she agrees to marry a ship owner, Massimo, a sweet, affectionate, discreet and rich man, twenty years her senior; but soon, after a year of living together, she gets tired of this husband who acts somewhat like a father to her, and she lets herself be tempted once again by the fascination of Gerardo. Liana, however, rejects this affair, which she knows to be ephemeral, in order to dedicate herself to taking care of her family, consisting of her father, now widowed, and her young sister Leonora, only to later realize that Leonora has become Gerardo’s lover. Leonora is convinced, as Liana once was, that this is true love, when it’s evident that Gerardo will abandon her soon. To save Leonora from the shock of delusion, Liana kills Gerardo and surrenders herself to the police. In so doing, the woman contradicts herself, since she twice rejected the possibility of a stable relationship through fear of monotony; she renounced her marriage soon after beginning a new affair which she then immediately abandoned, as if trying to get her own back on Gerardo.
In sum, Liana is an extremely contradictory character, who frequently ends up doing the opposite of what she had previously decided to do. She doesn’t know what she wants. Liana dances around the tree of life without ever touching it: she will have no children. She is a very modern character, in whom many may recognize themselves; her errors as well as her wanderings are absolutely moving. Finally, there are some similarities with the heroine of The Barefoot Contessa, shot that same year in Rome by Mankiewicz.
Such a plot could have easily led to a descriptive, objective, clinical film, constructed with the gaze of an entomologist, which perhaps would have known how to win the favor of Italian critics. But this narrative is inserted into the framework of a widely abused and despised genre (like almost all genres), the melodrama, whose conventions and commonplace elements – according to critics – suffocate the possibility of being taken seriously. In fact, they increase the film’s power tenfold, thanks to the emotion they provide. Una donna libera is, like other films by Cottafavi (Una donna ha ucciso, Traviata 53, In amore si pecca in due and, to a certain extent, Maria Zef), the story of a woman, a woman who walks alone, often in the rain, roaming the streets, aimlessly, prey to her interior turmoils, as will come to fruition at the end of this film. This will either get her killed, or she herself will end up as a killer. It is a female path underlined by the unusual and insistent music of Renzo Rosselllini, of Giovanni Fusco or, as in this case, of Tchaikovsky. And the boldly-colored melodrama, the flamboyant melodrama, is above all the complex, often erratic path of a woman, like that of Jennifer Jones in King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry, or that of Viviane Romance in Abel Gance’s Venus aveugle, or that of Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi’s Oharu, or that of Yvonne Sanson in Matarazzo’s Tormento.
The mélo is, by definition, a genre marked by music, which gives an extraordinary power to Una donna libera, in which one of the protagonists is an orchestra conductor obsessed with Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, a piece we listen to many times throughout the film. Its intrinsic force is increased by the aggressiveness of the repetition and by its implied suspense: the music is alternatively extra-diegetic and diegetic, and Cottafavi delights in tricking us, for an instant, as to its real origin. [1]
The game of emotions is reinforced by the presence of other elements typical of the melodrama:
a) The unexpected coincidence: it is at the very least surprising that Gerardo, after having seduced Liana, tries his luck on her younger sister, whom he didn’t even know.
b) The lack of verisimilitude; for example, the scene with the revolver. Facing Liana’s wrath, Gerardo mockingly and arrogantly suggests to the heroine that, given she hates him so much, she should kill him, and offers her a loaded gun (which she will fire at him) while he sits by the piano ‘in order to render this moment more suggestive’, given that ‘we’re at the core of melodrama’, as he himself will say. Through this, Cottafavi adds to the scene a remarkable touch of humor, and introduces, with extreme modernity, the idea of the film inside the film. We’re in metacinema: the director works on the emotion at the same time that he mocks his own work. We must observe the fact that this part of the scene literally references Matarazzo’s Catene (1949), one of melodrama’s greatest commercial successes and an absolutely natural reference for audiences at the time. But with a difference: in Matarazzo, Yvonne Sanson doesn’t kill the cruel Aldo Nicodemi who offers her the gun; so Cottafavi adds something more. We should also note that Freda too, in Beatrice Cenci (1956), will once again use the Pathétique: in fact, the Italian melodrama constitutes a single whole, from which it is risky to single out any particular film.
c) The importance of family ties. Here, there are no children, as in the flamboyant melodrama, but there’s the twenty-year-old younger sister. Liana tries to keep her a child. Then there are both parents, the father – at first a man of principle and then, after the mother dies, more easy-going – and the mother who, despite being distressed by her daughter’s behavior, remains her accomplice, with blood ties revealed to be stronger than all else. These family scenes, as in Matarazzo, refer the film to neorealism.
d) The importance of mirrors, as in Douglas Sirk. Mirrors allow the heroine (like that of Una donna ha ucciso) to realize just how much the moral trials and the stigmata of time have marked her face, which changes significantly over the course of the film. Mirrors also allow the film to isolate characters and their bodies, to insert them into a particularly meaningful, almost abstract frame, which summarizes the protagonist’s situation in a given moment. I think for example of the scene when Liana and her husband assess the failure of their marriage.
e) The flashback. The film is based on a flashback, which comprehends almost the entirety of the action, as also happens in Traviata 53, Una donna ha ucciso and Nel gorgo del peccato. It is a very frequent procedure for the mélo, one that aligns it with films of greater ambitions: the flashback, in the years 1945–55, was one of the constants of the arty film. It is an element that avoids the banality of linear chronological storytelling (typical, on the other hand, of Matarazzo), as are voice-over (which is used a lot in Una donna libera), oblique angles (there are two), soft focus and superimposition. The flashback raises the film above the rest: we need not wait to find out what will happen; instead the crime has already happened, or the heroine is already dead (see Traviata 53). The suspense is less vulgar: the spectator doesn’t ask himself ‘what will happen?’, but ‘how will we get here?’. Besides, to know the end of the film from the beginning reinforces the feeling of the existence of Destiny. Destiny, a basic element of the mélo...
Part of the film is set in Paris, given it’s an Italian-French co-production; but it’s just archival material, given nothing was shot in Paris: the architect’s car moves through a nocturnal Paris, and so the outside is invisible. Very convenient... Co-production: therefore, both main actors are French; Françoise Christophe, excellent tragic actress and stage performer whom we'll reencounter in another great mélo by Abel Gance, Marie Tudor (1966), and Pierre Cressoy. Why Pierre Cressoy? Because the role was that of an orchestra conductor, and Cressoy had just played the character of Giuseppe Verdi in Matarazzo’s homonymous film. Cressoy is as severe with his beard and moustache in Matarazzo’s film as he is magniloquent beardless and round-faced in Cottafavi's. But the role itself demands it: here, he’s a dandy, a cynical and pretentious Don Juan, infatuated with himself, sure of his talent, and he must seem hateful to the audience, who will then more easily accept his killing by the heroine. She even asks if he really has talent: ‘You only know how to take. An artist must give’; Liana, towards the end of the film, knows how to accurately describe him. He knows very well how to milk Tchaikovsky's pathos, that’s easy, but we see him interpreting Mozart, Vivaldi and Bach very poorly. It's a bluff. Cressoy is a mediocre actor, but he is perfect for the role, given that he plays a fraudulent artist, a braggart.
Two French actors and, as for the rest, with the exception of Christine Carère, only Italians, among whom Elisa Cegani, a very effective actress in the role of the mother, formerly the omnipresent diva of Mussolinian cinema (Ma non è una cosa seria!, Ettore Fieramosca, La corona di ferro), and therefore a favorite of older audiences. For this reason, there does not exist an original version of the film. Both protagonists are dubbed by Italian actors in the Italian version and, in the French one, the Italians are the ones who are dubbed (in such a way as to emphasize the melodramatic tone, particularly in the parts related to the artistic milieu, which seems more vague in the Italian). One must notice the care given by Cottafavi to the extras. We never see them fixed in banal actions: each of them has a life of their own and peculiarities that bear witness to great creativity (the man going down the staircase with a cane, the policeman at the end, the students squabbling in the background).
Particularly remarkable are the moments of bravura in the film. The first one is hard to notice: it’s discrete, but it strikes the alert spectator by the secret virtuosity of the director. Gino Cervi (another brief guest star) and the heroine have maintained a strictly professional relationship up to this point, he as her employer, she as his interior decorator; on the image level, this relationship will remain the same until the end of the scene. But the soundtrack is as follows:
He (in): — Listen... Maybe this will seem ridiculous to you. A man of my age always risks being ridiculous when saying such things...
She (over): — I knew what he was about to say. I expected this moment almost fearfully. Instead, when he spoke with that kindness, that simplicity that only Massimo had, I felt a great calm falling upon me. I looked at him, and felt very grateful for him, and I felt like crying. We got married in May.
And, despite their faces never approaching that of the other, with the camera fixed on Liana’s dreaming gaze, Cottafavi immediately cuts to the wedding cake. Such a tour de force could only be achieved by an ingenious narrator: show nothing and, in ten seconds, two lives are completely changed without the audience feeling even the slightest bump. It all happens sweetly, like the flow of a river. The voice-over sometimes allows, as in this case, for the elimination of the diegetic soundtrack, because it is able to express much more directly what dialogue would say in a much more prolix and banal way.
“With the camera fixed on Liana's dreaming gaze, Cottafavi immediately cuts to the wedding cake."
The real bravura moment can be found at the end of the film, and it reveals exceptional mastery, speed and density. In the family house, someone is listening to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. Liana is there. Suddenly we realize it’s the end of Gerardo’s concert, broadcasted live on the radio. As a matter of fact, Leonora, the younger sister, had gone to a concert that night. Liana understands everything, mainly because, the night before, Leonora had repeated some words Gerardo used to say. Liana frantically scavenges through Leonora’s drawers (with a very Hitchcockian use of detail) while the music rises, and she discovers a photograph of Gerardo inscribed to Leonora. In his dressing room after the concert, Gerardo invites Leonora to the exit, to the left. And, in an extraordinary montage effect, Liana, who’s still in her house, dashes in the opposite direction. The woman goes against Gerardo. The conflict between three characters is rendered only through two-shots, which exclude the third character, in such a way as to increase the tension even further. [2]
"In his dressing room after the concert, Gerardo invites Leonora to the exit, to the left. And, in an extraordinary montage effect, Liana, who's still in her house, dashes in the opposite direction. The woman goes against Gerardo."
The camera often slides over the characters’ countenances, reading the most interesting reactions in their faces seen in profile rather than frontally, [3] in a technique which recalls Ophüls and Preminger. Then, after the confrontation in which Leonora unjustly accuses her sister of jealousy, Liana and Gerardo are left alone, one facing the other, in the aforementioned scene with the gun. Here we witness a famous effect first used by Cottafavi in Traviata 53: a quick dolly-in on Liana holding the gun, immediately followed by an equivalent dolly-out as the woman murders Gerardo, sitting by the piano. A cacophonous crash of fingers over the keyboard: a prolonged, dull and crude note. This contradictory, absurd movement accurately illustrates the culmination of the crisis; the camera’s back-and-forth expresses all the better Liana's contradictions and her confusion. Then, after Liana’s long wander through the city streets, the camera rises from behind the heroine’s back and reveals to us the police station, where the police officer on duty, wearing his uniform, lets her in, calmly smoking a cigarette. Therefore, accompanied by a roaring music, we have witnessed a series of commonplace elements ending in a contradictory and unusual note, the cop’s cigarette, when instead we expected to find at the police station the usual tragic and conventionally repressive elements. It’s the cherry on the cake. It is one of the most beautiful sequences (it’s in fact six shots, connected by the musical bond) in the history of Italian cinema, alongside that of the couple embraced in death in Pompeii in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia and the little boy’s discovery of his mother’s infidelity in Matarazzo’s Catene. I saw this sequence on 4th May 1955, at around 11:30 am, at the Le Paris, in the Champs Elysées, and thirty-five years later I still remembered it perfectly. I hadn’t forgotten anything. Certainly, Rossellini’s sequence has a profound meaning, the frailty and eternity of man and love, a meaning which Cottafavi’s finale, a gratuitous exercise of style built on commonplace elements, does not possess. But the sublime is often born out of inert material, since one is forced to give the most of oneself in order for the mediocrity or conventionality of the screenplay to be forgotten. So it is precisely because they have terrible screenplays that Magnificent Obsession (Sirk, 1953) or Yoshiwara (Ophüls, 1937) are extraordinary films.
The final six shots of the film, ending with the cop smoking a cigarette.
There also three other such bravura moments in Cottafavi’s work, not in Traviata 53, which follows a rather realistic, prosaic life path, but rather in an otherwise uneven film, Nel gorgo del peccato (1954), where we may find three breathtaking scenes:
— In the beginning, a beautiful view of the city seen from above accompanies the voice-over of Rita, the mother (once again, the magnificent Elisa Cegani), who speaks to us from above, from Heaven, where she has just arrived, commenting on the future of her son, who she managed to save.
— In the end, the scene which explains the reason for such a tragic demise: in order to prove the innocence of her son Alberto, unjustly accused of having murdered his fiancée Germaine, Rita forces the murderer to kill her as well. Given that he’ll be found guilty of Rita’s murder, the police will realize the similarities with Germaine’s death and Alberto will be cleared. An unusual and strong dramatic situation which will be reused in an episode of Derrick.
— Halfway through the film, in front of a police officer, Rita asks Germaine on her deathbed to utter the name of her murderer. Germaine, who is in a coma, can’t hear the question, and so the only thing she can do is murmur, in her last breath, the name of the man she loves, Alberto, who’ll be immediately accused by the police officer.
At the 1994 Locarno Film Festival, Cottafavi somewhat turned up his nose at Una donna libera. He said he hadn’t seen the film in forty years. It seemed to matter little to him. He despised above all the Dannunzian and decadent elements of the base material. To his genre films, which he shot due to a lack of better options, he seemed to prefer his television films, adapted from famous authors, for which he could claim not only the solidity of the score but also that of the libretto. An understandable reaction, if we consider that the film, upon release, didn’t receive a single positive review from critics either in France or Italy, who were instead interested in the guarantee of a powerful and politically (left) inclined ideological content, and were incapable of conceiving that a genre film could have merit; that’s why the melodrama was systematically excluded from their favor. Furthermore, after Fiamma che non si spegne was presented at Venice in ’49, Cottafavi was (stupidly) labeled by the Italian press as a bard of fascism. No one defended his work. Cottafavi even told me that one day he had glimpsed Rossellini exiting a screening of one of his films — I believe it was Traviata 53 — even though Rossellini had never admitted to having even seen a film by Cottafavi! And, lastly, despite the melodrama’s commercial label, Una donna libera grossed even less than the extremely anti-spectacular monument of neorealism, Umberto D: 107 million lire against Cottafavi’s 96 million. It is a risky thing to have one foot in the arts and the other in commerce... We’re far away from the results of the more popular melodramas: 958 million lire for Matarazzo’s I figli di nessuno. Cottafavi even said that his melodramas had been absolute fiascos: an almost provocative excess of modesty, which ended up gaining him some sympathy. But it would have been absurd of him to shoot five melodramas one after the other if none of them had achieved even the slightest success. It is instead likely that his films, given their subjects and the actors involved, sold very well abroad, mainly in Hispanic countries and Germany.
It isn’t very clear why Cottafavi abandoned melodrama after this film. Maybe because they didn’t make enough money? Because Cottafavi had had enough of shooting films based on material unworthy of him? Or maybe because he felt he had exhausted the genre’s resources? Because he couldn’t do better than Una donna libera? Let us not forget, however, that he abandoned the peplum immediately after the brilliant box office results of both his Ercole films, which lets us suppose that these abdications were the fruit of his own personal initiative rather than that of producers.
Bianco & Nero, 559, September–December 2007, pp. 67–74.
Translated from French to Italian by Chiara Tognolotti.
Translated from Italian to English by Gabriel Carvalho.
Notes
Cottafavi is a passionate music lover. The attempts at experimental and exotic music in Traviata 53 and Nel gorgo del peccato, a vulgar detective film where they appear completely out of place, are a testament to that. Never has music been so inseparable from a film as it is in Una donna libera, except for the case of I’ve Always Loved You (Frank Borzage, 1946).
Translator’s note: Moullet is misremembering; in fact, in this scene, each character is shown separately, in single shots.
As in the scene when Gino Cervi and Françoise Christophe break up, where the weariness is visible in their faces for only an instant; and Cervi can clearly see this when he looks at his wife. The voice-over is almost pleonastic.