A digitally restored re-release of Roberto Rossellini’s landmark 1954 psychological drama, which via its minimal plotting helped redefine the possibilities of cinematic storytelling.
George Sanders and the director’s then-wife Ingrid Bergman play English upper-middle-class couple the Joyces, who while visiting Naples and its environs realise their marriage is sliding into crisis.
Juxtaposing the living and the dead, fiction and ‘reality’, north and south and the material and the spiritual, Journey To Italy essays a profound empathy with its troubled characters’ feelings about their foreign environment.
Beautifully acted, it’s also one of the cinema’s most moving statements on how desperately short life is.
