Analysis of Luchino Visconti’s Film ‘rocco And His Brothers’ (1960)

      It is obvious that with ‘Rocco and his Brothers’ Visconti returnes to the classical Italian neo-realism. There is no need to look deep into the story to find all the specific features of the style: detailed depiction of the lives of people from lower class society, touching the relevant social and political problems in modern Italy, tendency to shoot about emotions of individuals, etc.

     If we make a brief research on the Italian society of the post-war and later periods, we can see that difference between the South and the North was a sore point for Italians: separated by the World War II, the two parts underwent different stages of economical and cultural development; Nothern Italy, being closer to civilization, so to say, recovered and advanced faster than the southern part, which remained poor and desolated for many years. This difference was probably causing the conflicts among the civilians.

      As we see now, the opening sequence is already a story with a social context, which serves as the set up for future developments: the poor Parondi family of four brothers and their widowed mother arrives to Milan to live with the fifth brother – Vinchenzo. Vinchenzio is devoted to a girl from Milan (Ginetta) and her family, so the unexpected arrival of the poor relatives is a cause for the conflict, which makes the Parondi family leave to search for a more modest shelter. Helping his family, Vinchenzo visits an old man Armando to tell him about losing Ginetta and an apartment, to ask for help, and Armando’s joke “For you a room and a fiancee are one and the same?” can be viewed as a key line for all the future happenings. I believe that the issue about family vs. social presets is the core topic of ‘Rocco and his Brothers’, and Visconti will be stressing this point again later on in the film: the brothers will face many obstacles which can be overcome by deciding whether they stay with the family or leave it.

      So, following Armando’s advice to wait for eviction notice, the Parondi brothers will have to move again later. However, the family’s move to a basement is another point in the film when new difficulties find them. On one of the evenings Vinchenzo meets a Milanese prostitute Nadia, -a very ambiguous character, whose moral attitudes will be constantly shifting from prostitution to love towards the brothers. It is not pure accident that Rosaria, the mother, does not like Nadia and warns her sons – the woman will be the reason for Simone’s downfall and will bring miseries to a naive and innocent Rocco.

      The involvement of brothers in boxing is another way to describe the same layers of social and personal problems of the characters: Simone once gets a chance to become a champion, but the unhappy love to Nadia will never let him succeed; besides this, the growing conflict between Simone and his trainers constantly spins around the problem of enmity between Northerners and Southerners.

      The structure of the plot is also a neo-realistic one, since it is not an artificial, neatly constructed story; it looks like a biographical description of a poor South-Italian family, which has its own ups and downs, its wins and losses.

      It is also worth mentioning that in the end, when the family has passed through all the misfortunes, there is still no just solution for all the problems that the Parondi family faced: Rocco’s and Ciro’s diligence has been rewarded with successful careers, Vinchenzo has a family, but from the last conversation between Ciro and Luca we see that the the brothers still have unsolved problems about their past and future. Visconti does not let the brothers make the right choice – whether they should return to their roots and live a quiet life in their village, or they should wait for better times to come in Milan. Such kind of uncertainity about the future of the characters in the end of the film is another typical feature of the neo-realistic storytelling; I also had a thought that the final shot of the film, with Luca walking away into the distance can be considered as one of the trademarks of neo-realism, since it is a very strong way to depict this uncertainity (can be compared with the last shot from de Sica’s ‘Umberto D.’).  

      As far as the characters are concerned, it should be mentioned that Visconti definitely made strong considerations on casting the young actors. Watching the brothers and the prostitute Nadia on their first meeting in the basement, we can easily realize that the sexually attractive features of all of them are already a good set up for a love story with a tragic outcome.