Italy, France, 1963
Directed by Francesco Rosi
With Rod Steiger (Edoardo Nottola), Carlo Fermariello (De Vita), Angelo D’Alessandro (Balsamo), Guido Alberti (Maglione), Salvo Randone (De Angelis), Vincenzo Metafora (the mayor)
A man talks excitedly to a small group of silent fellows as well-dressed, serious, distinguished the fiery speaker, pacing up and down frantically a small spot of a huge waste ground. Then in the crowded, huge hall of a modern building official-like men stand gathered around a vast model of building to be build listening to one of them heaping praise on the project lying in the front of him, the city, the government. And then in the outside journalists try to know more as some of those officials banter and one of them, a minister, no less, boards a chopper.
This string of three short scenes shot in medium and long shots edited before the titles roll on depicts on a swift, matter-of-fact manner the birth of an urban development project, from the mind of the builder to the public announcement, thanks to the power of politics. It is about adding a new area to the sprawling city that spectacular aerial shots show next, as the titles at long last appear. Naples is changing, because it needs to, and that means a lot of impressive construction work.
Indeed, once the titles have rolled on, while still high in the air, the camera is trained to a construction site. It swoops on the place, surveys the ground: around the busy workers stand old, decrepit buildings, with squalid back alleys and apartments. Then an event upends everything, the routine of the men as well as what has seemed to be the routine of the film: part of a wall in one those old constructions collapses, then others. This is a dramatic, deadly disaster, shot up-close and unremittingly. The narrative can now begins.
Why did the tragedy happen? A fresh high angle long shot brings the audience to where most of the film would actually take place: the stage and the corridors of city power, the town hall, the hall where the councilors meet and vote, the rooms where they haggle or just talk, the rooms where the clerks of the various departments try to make things run smoothly, taking into account the rules, however lacking they are. For the leftist opposition to the mayor and his right-leaning majority, the accident is an opportunity to investigate the links between the city council and some businessmen and to expose corruption. This is a topic that matters a lot to councilor De Vita and the impassioned, obstinate politician hopes to target and censure Edoardo Nottola – the equally keen and tough businessman who was speaking in the very first scene, has cropped up in the film, turns out to be the owner of the construction company in charge of the site where the tragedy happened.
A special investigative committee, with a narrow remit, is formed and the roving camera tracks its members as they delve into the nitty-gritty work of the city’s administrative departments. The film becomes a lesson in the management of land and construction, with a dint of suspense. But soon it moves beyond: it focuses on Edoardo Nottola and then to his relations with politicians, especially the leader of the right in the city council, Maglione. The inquiry is only part of the troubles driving mad Edoardo Nottola: his reputation is at risk and business has slowed; but what he hopes, and badly needs, is that it does not keep him from getting elected to the city council, as local elections draw very close. Beyond money, and because of money, the topic keeps moving, and the film is the tense, riveting chronicle of political shenanigans and reckonings, desperate efforts to influence the public and other politicians, the blunt fight for power and survival.
Betrayal is the bigger risk, but also the most valuable tool to change the game: Maglione, sensing a scandal too big to overlook, falls out with Edoardo Nottola who campaigns for himself relying on his own resources out of defiance as well as greed, while a decent, stern doctor, who entered politics to change life, Balsamo, slowly embraces the viewpoint of De Vita even as he sits in a group of centrist and becomes a stumbling block on the road of power of the center’s chief, De Angelis. Things come to a head inevitably after the polls, as voters hand more ballots to the center, defending the right.
There is no room for optimism in this taut, dynamic feature. As the hectic first meeting of the newly elected assembly ends, once again De Vita makes a vehement speech denouncing corruption and the success of his nemesis – Edoardo Nottola has been elected, is made a deputy to the mayor in charge of the land management, and keeps running his company, with the blessing of both the center, and surprise, and the right, a sorry fact illustrating how political interests can be egregiously and unashamedly conflated with personal economic interest. The close shot is as impressive as the previous ones focused on the character – and the remarkable actor, real activist Carlo Fermariello – but then the camera starts to track out: at the end, the councilor is just one little man standing in the vast hall, a distant figure barely noticeable among the rows of men in suit in the background of the final image and the crowd of the citizens on the foreground. Then the montage cuts into a scene shot in the outdoors: the film comes back to the initial waste ground, to record a ceremony marking the beginning of a new construction project. It does not sound quite what the beginning suggested, but still Edoardo Nottola is in charge. The more things change, the less they do, in fact.
“Le mani sulla città – Hands Over the City” is a fiction, mainly because director Francesco Rosi did not want to run into trouble with real folks. But there is a stunning documentary edge to the feature that makes it even more compelling, and the charge it raises even stronger. It also delivers a harrowing vision of the hardscrabble life of the Naples’ poor, scenes worthy of the neorealism’s quest for authenticity. However, its brisk pace and a striking imagination for shot composition, the skills of some in the cast, starting with lead actor Rod Steiger, turn it into a kind of thriller, a powerful visual tale of personal conflict and ethical battle. It points to an old debate among those involved in power: what is more important, to keep one’s convictions from erring on the wrong side, as Balsamo claims, or to keep one’s seat safe from attack and defeat in order to be able to change something some distant day, as De Angelis claims, a dialogue between the two sides of the same coin that is shot in the lavish office of the political leader and in the dark, a moral clash visually captured by carefully chosen shots in a stifled atmosphere that leaves few doubts about who would eventually prevail.
Even more interestingly, it also highlights what truly opposes De Vita to Edoardo Nottola in an amazing encounter in a building Edoardo Nottola’s workers have just finished, the dialogue being shot not so much with a string of shots and reverse shots than with a series of POV shots, each taken from the position of one of the men, with the consequence the actor looks straight at the audience, who are compelled to listen to the opposite claims and to make up their minds. This tense exchange reveals how cleverly modernization is getting viewed not as a mere fact but as a value and an ideology, thus cloaking naked interest under the guise of the need for providing people better material conditions – but actually, as De Vita notes, this makeshift ideology conspicuously avoids investigating what people do want and what price they end up paying for the dreams they are deemed to have. And the film bluntly forces the audience to face that inconvenient truth.