Amiable fumblers in uniform

As life-spans stretch, nonagenarian directors multiply. Mario Monicelli was ninety when he made this film about a World War II Italian medical unit in the Libyan desert, a few Germans, and an earthy Dominican friar. There’s good humor and gentleness here, but none of the sharp humor and riotous buffoonery that marked Monicelli’s work in his heyday of the late Fifties and early Sixties—Big Deal on Madonna Street, The Organizer, and La Grande Guerra. The possibilities of a tragic-comic subject—a clueless young military unaware their side is losing sent to a zone where they’re helpless—is pretty much thrown away amid a flurry of charming and humanistic incidents that never really come together. Five or six writers labored to combine two literary sources (Mario Tobino’s The Libyan Desert and part of Giancarlo Fusco’s Soldier Sanna), and that’s pretty evident.

The picture of military dilettantism is immediately established when the medical unit arrives in a desert location and its C.O. is too busy writing a love letter to his wife Luisa—which he pretends is a “report”—to make the simplest decision as to where to store the supplies. He delegates authority to one of his doctors, Lieutenant Marcello Salvi (a game Giorgio Pasotti), who passes the decision on to a truck driver. Salvi’s main interest at first, till he’s sent to treat a voluptuous Arab babe and sends her a love note that gets them all in trouble, is taking snapshots with a 35 mm. camera.

Salvi snaps animals and kids; a man who makes him pay later turns out to be a transplanted Sicilian living high on a small budget with a couple of wives he treats so carelessly he hasn’t noticed one is blind. Other incidents point up the benevolence combined with military incompetence of the Italian soldiers. Michele Placido brings much enthusiasm to his role as the earthy friar Simeone who follows the troops when his school kids run off, but since he’s a sort of Don Camillo without a flock, his character remains underdeveloped. Alessandro Haber as the C.O., Major Stefano Strucchi, remains even more one-note, though when his wife comes to grief he turns from detached to suicidal.

Forty minutes in, the planes come to bomb and strafe the hapless soldiers. An ambitious general (Tatti Sanguineti) forces the major to build a cemetery. Obnoxious Germans arrive. Their “Heil Hitler” Nazi salutes are not returned by the milder, less disciplined but infinitely more human Italians. Friar Simeone marries an expired solider to secure benefits and a good name for his pregnant girlfriend back home. The general zooms around in a sidecar motor scooter in speeded up sequences. It would all be hilarious if it made more sense, or tragic if it took itself more seriously. A real committee effort, this movie has many little charms, but winds up bland and forgettable. No sign of a rising cinematic pulse in Italy from this example.

Saverio Guarna’s cinematography is pretty, especially at night, but is as theatrical as the Taviani brother’s Night of the Shooting Stars—in comparison to which, despite the desert sun, this effort pales. There may be some ideas here that would not have been thought of in the Fifties, but the presiding sensibility doesn't seem quite up to date.

Desert Roses (Le rose del deserto) was shown as the opening night event of the seventh annual Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center, 2007.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.