Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1950 • Italy, United States
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale
The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island. After World War II, a Lithuanian refugee (Bergman) marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) she meets in a prisoner of war camp and accompanies him back to his isolated village on an island off the coast of Sicily. Cut off from the world, she finds herself crumbling emotionally, but she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Balancing the director’s trademark neorealism—exemplified here in a remarkable depiction of the fishermen’s lives and work—with deeply felt melodrama, STROMBOLI is a revelation.
Up Next in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Adventures in Moviegoing
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Jhumpa Lahiri on LA POINTE COURTE
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La Pointe Courte
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe NoiretThe great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...
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Jhumpa Lahiri on THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY