A remarkable film: emotional and austere, dark and shattering, quick, packed with absolute silence along with peoples' busy chatter. Ordinary, beautiful, & awful. It is profoundly atmospheric & deliciously gets under the viewer's skin: the dark winter, fog, cold, hiding, people in corners, against walls, stuck in rooms, against windows, under shadowy arcades, a night that seems like day and a day that's never fully lit. And yet the story is straightforward, not forced,nor intellectually pretentious. "A" goes to "b" goes to "c" with knife-edge clarity. At the center of the plot is a kind of Romeo-Juliet love story. Beautifully complemented by the film's last few minutes -- a shot to the present of 1960 -- which makes that past of 1943 all the more fascinating and horrible. Simultaneously remote and intimate; inescapable. A work of genuine cinematic substance & recognized as such in Europe: where it won "Lion d'or" and for which a young Pier Paolo Pasolini worked on the script. Plus it's profoundly Italian: aware of the crimes, the sins of the recent war, the inescapable pressures and violence of politics and class. And aware that people can only do so much. There is no escape. Everyone is at the mercy of larger forces. Why do people need to see zombie films when there is story, there is history, like this of such exquisite and unforgettable, unforgivable cruelty? This is a film to preserve, remember, study, and, perhaps, even learn from.
Review of It Happened in '43
