THE MYSTERY OF MARRIAGE: Roberto Rossellini's JOURNEY TO ITALY (1954, co-adapt/dir by Robert Rossellini, starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, Italy/France, 85mns)

Robert Rossellini is a full blown discovery for this writer. Unprepared for the power and humanism of his war trilogy (ROME, OPEN CITY, PAISAN, GERMANY YEAR ZERO) or the intense spirituality and humor of his THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, this writer had been missing a key puzzle piece in the power of cinema.

Part of an informal trilogy starring his then wife, Ingrid Bergman ( that includes STROMBOLI and EUROPA '51) Rossellini's JOURNEY TO ITALY tells the story of conflicted married couple Katherine and Alex Joyce. They have come to Italy to sell a house of Alex's recently deceased Uncle. Alex is British, Katherine is European (Bergman was Swedish but this is never spelled out in the movie). But the vacation and Italy itself has an unnerving effect on the couple. Soon they are bickering, flirting with others, confronting issues in their marriage that work and distraction have papered over. It all boils to a final confrontation across a few days.

JOURNEY TO ITALY is a Martin Scorsese favorite. A huge devotee of Rossellini (who, though deceased, was technically Scorsese's father-in-law when Scorsese was married to Rossellini's and Bergman's daughter Isabella Rossellini), Scorsese has talked in documentaries and interviews about Rossellini's neo-realist and beyond effect on Scorsese's heart and psyche.

What feels clear after watching five Rossellini movies is that the filmmaker is a master of clarity and subtlety, humanism and spirituality, redemptive and destructive behavior.

What's so strange, in a beautiful way, about JOURNEY TO ITALY, is that it's a very strange quiet movie about a very fundamental theme: the complexities of marriage.

Sometimes the simplest and most direct framing is the best. We can see right away this married couple is past the “honeymoon” phase.

Katherine is passive-aggressive, Alex is sarcastic. They get on each other's nerves. They have had no children and don't have much to say to each other anymore.

Instead, Alex begins to flirt with other women. Katherine brings up a young man they both knew who died. Alex realizes Katherine may have loved the young man.

What you see are two married people speaking to each other more in the language of wanting to hurt/cut the other rather than heal/love the other. Something has gone wrong. They have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Or maybe they missed an onramp somewhere.

At the same time, Italy itself has a strange effect on both of them. The structure of the movie is brilliant but elusive. Scenes of the couple's marital discord are juxtaposed with scenes of Katherine visiting museums, statues, catacombs, spiritual sites and Alex circling women at parties, hotels, etc.

Rossellini uses the simple and concise technique of showing pregnant women or women with babies to emphasize that Alex and Katherine DO NOT have a baby together. Rossellini emphasizes the dead over and over again (via tombs, catacombs, excavation of bodies in Pompeii, skulls) to dramatically emphasize the existential anxiety the married couple feels of life slipping through their fingers. Of the chance/opportunity to feel love, connection fleeting somewhere like the smoke that rises from the natural heating vents slit into a mountain in one scene.

In the best possible way, Rossellini movies feel engineered for the middle aged (this writer is 47). I'm not sure these movies would have meant as much to me at 20. Now, after a few decades of getting beaten by the two by four that is life (and I still love life despite the crowbar), there is more experience and reference to understand the complicated, indeterminate emotions the central couple experience.

Human behavior is so strange and paradoxical. Sometimes we make declarative statements that we really mean as questions. Sometimes we tell people we hate them when in fact we want their love. Sometimes we scream for things to end only to realize we were really trying to re-start something.

JOURNEY TO ITALY somehow expresses all this in beautiful cinematic language.

It even goes somewhere deeper. Rossellini claimed to not be spiritual but to still have a profound appreciation for the core values of Christianity as he understood them: service to others, forgiveness, loving kindness. Values he felt were missing in the materialist modern world. All five of his movies are clear in their transcendent humanism.

JOURNEY TO ITALY is replete with the sense of the dead hovering around and communicating with the living. It is rich with a sense that contact with art, prayer, what some of us call God can connect us to something deeper within us. And sometimes even grant us the grace of unexpected redemption. A second chance. A breaking of the blockage to free up the flow of emotion, love, connection that can be the coalescence of two psyches into one river that is known as marriage.

The movie contextualizes this in the even greater flow of existence, groups of people engaged in something vital and messy. The last scene of the movie takes place during a wild crowd's almost ecstatic reaction to a Catholic religious parade.

What the movie is saying isn't quite obvious. It is something deeper. There is tremendous emotion at the end of the movie. An emotion that has been bottled up the entire time.

It takes you by surprise. You experience a moment and scene in life as if it is actually happening to you.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.