Best Actress: Anna Magnani
I'm about to confess the dumbest thing...
...but I'd forgotten just how integral a literal rose tattoo was to the plot. In the years since I've seen this, I'd forgotten that there actually is a rose tattoo and it's not some symbolic gothic Tennessee Williams title. Anywhoo!
I think that was just the general vibe I got out of the film, unfortunately. There was so much going on and it wasn't really all that interesting to me, aside from the performances. Basically the gist is that Serafina Delle Rose, played by Anna Magnani, doesn't know that her husband is cheating on her. She's utterly devoted to him. But then he dies while driving his truck (doing some illegal transportation) and she canonizes him, even though everyone around her knows that he was not a good man worth her grief. She shuts herself away from the world for three years, and in that time she becomes slovenly and reclusive, an object of pity, and her daughter, Rosa (played by Marisa Paven) matures and develops romantic feelings for a classmate (or a slightly older boy? I've already forgotten), and the world moves on without her.
Then she wakes up after three years to find out all of this, and to find out that her husband wasn't faithful to her. She learns this from some prostitutes who hound her to fix a scarf they need. Then she goes to the priest, who refuses to tell her what he knows is true, so she attacks him. Then she goes to the bar and finds her husband's ex-mistress (who in the opening moments of the film is seen leaving a tattoo parlour, and when asked by some kids what she got, she says "A rose tattoo on my chest," and I'm sitting on my couch going, "Riiiiight, there's a real rose tattoo in this!") who tells her that he was unfaithful.
It shatters her worldview and she makes it everyone's problem. She terrorizes her daughter and her beau, and makes him swear to a statue of the Virgin Mary that he'll respect Rosa's virginity. She terrorizes the neighbourhood with her antics. She terrorizes Burt Lancaster, who is in this, for whatever reason. The first scene he's in involves him carrying Serafina out of the church so she'll stop attacking the priest, and the second is him crying alongside her because when others cry, he cries (and their tones of voice in this scene gives off Liz Lemon crying to Jerry Seinfeld).
I saw a Letterboxd review for The Rose Tattoo compare him to a clown and it's a really accurate description, honestly. You never know what you're in for when you see Burt Lancaster appear on your screen. And in this, he's running the whole circus. He's a clown. He's drunk. He's crying. He's somehow so drunk he can't tell Serafina and Rosa apart. He goes and gets a rose tattoo himself! He climbs the top of a ship's mast and beckons to Serafina.
Ultimately, The Rose Tattoo is about the obsessive nature of love and how it can destroy us if we let it. To keep living beyond grief.
I said earlier that what I think works best about this film is the acting performances. They're very bombastic but also very natural. These feel like real people speaking real words, not actors on a set. Anna Magnani is great as Serafina (I don't believe I've seen her in anything else, lemme check... wait, I've seen her in The Fugitive Kind too, but I have no memory of it) and really sells the many facets of her personality. She runs through a gamut in this film, and every acting choice feels believable.
DID I LIKE THE ROSE TATTOO? Meh.
Did you like The Rose Tattoo? What are your thoughts on Anna Magnani's Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
Comments
Post a Comment