My Dad Is 100 Years Old
In May 1948 Ingrid Bergman wrote a letter to director Roberto Rossellini: “Dear Mr. Rossellini, I have seen your films Rome, Open City and Paisan and I enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, has not forgotten her German, is barely comprehensible in French and who can only say ‘I love you’ in Italian, I am ready to come to Italy to work with you.”
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In celebration of Rossellini’s centenary, this week the Music Box is showing his devout and lovely The Flowers of St. Francis–made in 1950, around the time Bergman became pregnant with their first child and Rossellini was having his marriage annulled. It isn’t a bad choice, though I’d have preferred Germany, Year Zero (1947), Europa ’51 (one of his features with Bergman, 1952), India (1959), or The Rise of Louis XIV (1966)–all difficult to find, as are most of his other films, which were mainly flops. On the same program is the comically irreverent and contradictory 16-minute tribute My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), written by and starring Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Rossellini and Bergman.
Roberto Rossellini was one of the heroes of 50s French auteurist criticism, exemplifying personal, independent filmmaking, along with Max Ophuls, Nicholas Ray, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles. But while Isabella is My Dad’s auteur, she isn’t the director–though near the end she fulfills both roles, directing Maddin to stop moving his camera around pointlessly and pretentiously, citing her father’s taste in such matters.
The film can be described as an act of both love and devotion, but it has none of the coyness of Bergman’s letter. (As her mother, Isabella is candid about Rossellini’s relationship with Anna Magnani without being catty.) “After a hundred years of filmmaking, ignorance in the world is still undefeated,” Isabella says to the Belly. “And your films? They’re slowly being forgotten. Nothing of what you preached happened. No followers. No apostles.” Later she adds, “My father was a genius–I think.” Her hesitation may alienate some of his acolytes, but she’s also paying him the ultimate tribute of accepting him on his own terms.
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