albnet Review of My Name Is Rocco Papaleo

My Name Is Rocco Papaleo (1971)

Bad directing but wonderful playing and well prepared story.

[5/10 · 23 January 2007]

The movie has a nice screenplay and a wonderful Mastroianni, but the directing is awful. The movie scenes are rhetoric and the photography too bad for 1971. It seems nobody took care about colors during the scenes. However the story will remain in your mind for a long time. The reflections of the old man are still impressive and you can understand the uncertainity of years '60 mentality. On the other side the crash of two worlds (the top model and the miner) is almost without winners, discovering the banality of everyones' life. The movie seems stupid at the beginning, but slowly you understand there is much more. The major insight arrives at the last scene, while the two players perform really good. It seems that the director also helped on the screenplay. Probably is good in creating the story but not on filming it. Mastroianni in this movie made me think about Alberto Sordi on "Bello onesto, emigrato in Australia". Actually only Sordi can replace Mastroianni in this play. Both stories are similar and the life of emigrants is described in the same way, that is half empty. The tendency of emigrants to loose their personality in a foreign environment can still be a good story today in the global era.