Rocco and His Brothers

When I go to Sicily, I see Southern California before it was developed.  I see rolling hills, groves of orange trees, acres of vineyards.  I see a place very much like paradise.  For postwar Sicilians, however, the island was more of a semifeudal hellhole where landholders and padrons divided the fruits of their toil.  For postwar Sicilians, the Crossroads of the Mediterranean was a place to leave.

Rocco and His Brothers, a film by Luchino Visconti, tells the story a Sicilian family that leaves.  The father has died and the mother brings four of her sons to Milan to make a new life under the leadership of Vincenzo, the fifth and oldest of the brothers and a young man who’s establishing himself in the northern city.

He is not happy to see them.  He can barely provide for himself.  Away we go.

To get this movie, I think one must accept that it isn’t a movie that about Sicilians.  Rather, it’s a Sicilian movie.  It has Sicilian attitudes toward family, toward women, toward obligation.  As the members of the family embark on their careers and make their way (or not) in the North, their unique cultural point of view defines everything about them.  When one of the brothers outrages another’s girlfriend, it’s the girlfriend that pays because family comes first.  When someone comes home with blood on his hands, the family’s first instinct is to hide the crime because family comes first.  This outlook so permeates the film that I, as an outsider, found it difficult to relate to these people.  Rocco and His Brothers throws me a bone by giving me one brother who sees things in a more recognizable moral framework, but he’s the family outlier: I got the sense that he’s the one who makes everyone else uncomfortable at dinner.

Is Rocco and His Brothers engrossing?  Yes.  Is it technically adept?  Yes.  Will it leave you scratching your head and wondering what the hell makes Sicilians tick?  Absolutely.  Just don’t go to the island to find out for yourself.  I want to keep it like California before the development.