Paisan (1946) and the Subversion of Tradition aka There Are No Happy Endings in War

Note: This essay was originally written as the script for a video, which will be linked at the bottom of this post.

Tale as old as time, right? Boy meets girl, Girl doesn't like Boy initially, Boy persists, and at the end, the couple escapes the bad situation they're in to enjoy their love. Right? Wrong. Paisan is not your average film. It's rough, dirty, and most of all, sad. Just like the events that it depicts. Paisan is an Italian Neo-Realist film directed by Roberto Rossellini, released in 1946, as the middle of an unofficial trilogy, bookended by Rome: Open City, released the previous year, and Germany, Year Zero, later released in 1948. This one is set during the Italian campaign from World War II, while Italy is occupied by the Nazis, but the Allied forces are starting to gain footholds to liberate the country. Hawkeye Pierce once said, "War isn't hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two, war is a whole lot worse.”

Paisan takes a similar stance. Because there are small victories, but not the ones you expect. Italian Neo-Realism is all about the subversion of tradition, both by design and by limitations. 1946 in America gave us a lot of classics, but classics that followed the formula we've come to expect. The Big Sleep and It's a Wonderful Life, are two films that ultimately have the expected happy ending. The detective solves the case and George Bailey is the most loved man in all of Bedford Falls. You can see that coming from a mile away. Paisan is different.

Paisan is a film in six parts, featuring six episodes as the liberation moves from the bottom of the boot all the way to the top, featuring all facets of the forces, from the American soldiers to the Italian partisans, to the Nazis, the OSS and even the men of the cloth get in on the action. And as I said earlier, they all feature victories... just not the ones you'd expect.

The first episode finds us in Sicily where an American recon team makes their way through an Italian village, coming across the townspeople. Only one of their group can speak Italian, and the Italians are very mistrustful of the soldiers. One of the locals, Carmela, is willing to guide the Americans through a minefield since her family recently went through the area and she wants to find them. They end up taking refuge in a castle, and as the recon team goes on ahead to scout, they leave one of their men, Joe, a soldier from New Jersey, behind to stay with Carmela until they get back. Joe can't speak Italian, so he tries to teach Carmela to speak English, and as they seem to get closer and start to understand each other despite the language barrier, a German sniper sees the flame from a cigarette and shoots Joe. The rest soon follow and the Germans set up camp, with Carmela hiding Joe's body and attempting to placate the Germans, at least until she can get back to Joe's gun to try to take down the Nazis singlehandedly. They make quick work of her and dump her body off a cliff before they depart, and when Joe's unit returns to find his dead body, they assume that Carmela betrayed them and killed Joe. See what I mean? There was a small victory, Carmela fights back and takes revenge, ostensibly in Joe's name, but Joe's unit will never know her sacrifice and forever believe she turned on them.

The rest of the film continues along the same structure. The second episode moves slightly north, up to Naples, as a drunk MP named Joe (Common name, eh? Wonder if he's also from Jersey) and an Italian street urchin named Pasquale go on an adventure, where Joe reveals how embittered he is, cause of the whole fact that he was fighting in the war, but the major Civil Rights milestones hadn't yet been hit stateside, which ends with Pasquale stealing his boots when he passes out. The following day, Joe catches Pasquale stealing from a military supply vehicle and confronts him, demanding his boots be returned. Pasquale relents and leads Joe back to his house, but upon seeing the squalor that Pasquale lives in, Joe silently leaves without his boots. Joe finds the kid who stole his boots and is about to get them back, but he realizes that Pasquale needs them more than he does.

The third episode takes place in liberated Rome and is personally my favorite segment of the film. A drunk soldier named Fred stumbles around the streets while a woman named Francesca escapes from the cops after a raid on the bar she was drinking in, finds him, and takes him up to a room since drunk soldiers are always looking for a good time. Fred isn't, he's lovesick over a girl he met when the Americans arrived and liberated Rome six months earlier, that he hasn't seen since, and he ships out tomorrow. I like this one because it's not immediately apparent that Fred is talking about Francesca because it's framed as if she listens to his story and she imagines the scenario in her head, placing herself in the place of the girl, it's not until the story finishes and SHE realizes it that it's obvious. (At least that's how I interpreted it) She still has feelings for him, and so leaves an address with the woman who owns the room to give to Fred when he wakes up, so that they can be reunited, but the next morning, Fred ignores the address, assuming it was for a whorehouse, and leaves Rome, and Francesca, waiting outside her apartment. Fred DID find Francesca after all, but he leaves without knowing that he did.

The fourth segment is in Florence, which was half liberated and half-contested, with most of the bridges connecting the two halves destroyed, so the Allied advance is slow-going. An American nurse named Harriet is desperate to see a man she knows, a painter turned revolutionary Partisan leader, named Lupo. A man, Massimo, another partisan, desperately wants to return to his family and find out if they're still alive, so they agree to help each other cross into the contested part of Florence through a supposedly secret passage, to find their loved ones. They go through thick and thin, sneaking across rooftops, evading Nazi gunfire, and finally arrive, and Massimo rushes off to his family as Harriet tries to help a Partisan soldier who was fatally shot in a doorway. As she helps, he reveals to her that Lupo had been killed earlier that day, and her journey was all for not. They made it through against all odds, and Massimo presumably found his family (at least I hope he did) but Lupo was dead the whole time.

The fifth episode takes place at a Catholic monastery where three American chaplains arrive and ask to stay the night. Naturally, the monks are happy to oblige their American comrades in cloth, especially when one of them offers up a whole bunch of rations and food to share with the entire monastery. Similar to the earlier segments, communication is a problem and only one of the chaplains can speak Italian, so he translates for the other two. The monks are none too pleased to discover an important fact about their guests. Only Captain Martin, the one who can speak Italian, is a Catholic. The others are a Protestant and a Jew respectively. Martin doesn't understand their position because, in his eyes, they all believe that they're right, and it's not his place to try to convert his colleagues. They're invited to dinner, but when they arrive, Martin notes that the monks have no food on their plates, they're fasting to gain God's favor to convert the two non-Catholics. The chaplains find a place to stay and are welcomed, but Martin finds out they were only so hospitable because they thought all three of them were Catholic.

The final episode is in the delta of the Po River, where members of the OSS are working with the Italian partisans to rescue some British airmen and fight against the Nazis, but are eventually overwhelmed and captured. The American and British officers are treated as prisoners of war, given proper quarters, and are to be taken care of until a prisoner transfer, because of the Geneva Conventions. The Partisans, on the other hand, are not protected under those, and so are due to be executed the following day. Two of the POWs try to stop the unnecessary bloodshed but are shot for their troubles along with the Partisans. The OSS officers were treated nicely, but the Partisans are shot and dumped into the river.

World War II left Italy with no studios, limited professional actors, (in fact, a good chunk of the actors in this movie weren't professionals), just a ruined country, and filmmakers like Rosselini with stories to tell about the difficulty of living in Post-World War II Italy. The use of traditional archetypes with subversive endings truly displays Rosselini's talent and skill, and the talent and skill of the six writers that he employed to write the film. And I'm gonna say all their names because no one ever takes the time to talk about screenwriters, (and at the time of this writing, it's particularly important to speak about the importance of writers) and I'll be damned if I'm gonna follow suit, especially because I want to be a screenwriter and I'd like to give them the proper credit. Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hayes, and Vasco Pratolini, each wrote an episode and they were all brilliant. They were so in sync that I don't think I'd have been able to tell that six different writers wrote the film. It feels like a fluid story to me.

Paisan is a brilliant film. It subverts your expectations to give you realism. Happy endings don't always happen in real life and they sure as hell don't happen in a warzone or a country still reeling from a war. But you get small victories, maybe not the ones you wanted, but victories nonetheless. And I think that's an idea that we need right now. We're not going to get a big victory, or the expected victory all the time. But we've got small victories to keep us going, and if that's what we have, it sucks, but they're still victories. And if you work hard, getting all those small victories, eventually, things will get better. And I think that's a sentiment that we can all agree on right now.