THE GOLDEN COACH (1952) ***1/2 Back before it was somewhere decided that international Italian actresses should look like Sophia Loren, or Claudia Cardinale or Tiziana Lodato, there was Anna Magnani. Italian Earth Mother. An actress who makes you fall as madly in love with her as any of the others, and primarily as the result of her incredible ability to...part of it has to do with utterly volcanic manifestations of her saucy personality, more I think has to do with somehow creating a reality of depths to be discovered. No matter how deep her performance gets there's always a sense that you're not anywhere close to touching the bottom. Of course Jean Renoir caught a lot of shit in the later days about not waving his flags as high, and not diving into the murky waters of unique presentation quite as emphatically, but I really don't know how much more political a film can get than this one (in a socio-political manner), and the director's treatment at least flirts generously with perfection. There's a sense of calm that Renoir communicates, apparently effortlessly, about not needing to shout or show off. Commentators who like the film typically go on about the extraordinary use of color, and that's right, but the bits that got me had more to do with the empathy between the director and the star. Renoir leaves the camera on Anna longer than anyone else would, or focuses on her instead of even bothering with what she's looking at or what's going on around her, in a way that few directors would think of and few actresses could sustain. There's a sense of breathing about it all, not breathlessness. Everyone else is well cast, and occasionally brilliant (Duncan Lamont, Raf de la Torre, the little kids), but more than anything else they know that they have to, because if they don't Anna will kick their ass.
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