NR | 1h 25min | Drama | 1952
Screenwriter-director Roberto Rossellini begins his film with a Biblical quote from St. Paul: “God chose the foolish things of this world to humiliate the learned, and the weak, to humiliate the strong.” Rossellini tells the story of St. Francis and the early Franciscans; their humility and selflessness turned the prevailing so-called wisdom of hedonism and conceit on its head.
Born in the 12th century, St. Francis, nicknamed “God’s Fool of Assisi,” is not to be confused with dozens of other Catholic saints, also named Francis, including St. Francis Xavier and St. Francis de Sales.
In the film, Francis has returned from Rome to the Italian village of Rivotorto, having secured Pope Innocent III’s permission to establish a new religious order, the Franciscans. Francis’s friars embrace vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They devote themselves to fasting, penance, prayer, preaching, and ministering to the poor and sick. For food and supplies they work or beg.
Instead of a linear plot, Rossellini presents slices of Franciscan life as episodes. In one, the friars return barefoot in the pouring rain to their hut. In their absence, a poor peasant has sheltered there. Instead of banishing him and his livestock, as is their right, they meekly leave, sheltering in ruins nearby.
In another episode, Brother Ginepro returns to the Franciscan fold bare-chested; out of compassion, he gave his tunic to a naked beggar he’d encountered. In yet another episode, aging simpleton Giovanni joins the band just to learn to imitate Francis’s simplicity.
Barring the actor Aldo Fabrizi who depicts the local tyrant Nicolai, non-actors, including real-life clergy, constitute much of the cast. Monks from the Nocere Inferiore Monastery portray the Franciscans. Ironically, the episode featuring Fabrizi veers into the realm of slapstick humor, distracting from an otherwise unvarnished style of storytelling.
Rossellini demystifies the saintly early Franciscans, depicting them as playful and occasionally goofy. He’s less concerned with how they came to virtue, and more concerned with how they stay virtuous. He’s interested in how God gives them their “daily bread,” how they forgive each other’s “trespasses,” how God leads them not into “temptation” and delivers them “from evil.”
Easter People in a Good Friday World
Francis, beset by the problems of an often brutal or bullying world, often buries his face in his hands; he’s pained and frustrated. But, without exception, when his face reemerges, it’s like as if? it’s been resurrected to a new, smiling, serene visage. Miraculously, he regains his childlike cheer, faith, and spontaneity. Viewers witness his seemingly “foolish” kinship with the elements of nature, the animals, and the birds.
Francis’s preoccupation with penance and poverty seems masochistic. But he worries less about shunning a visible, materialistic poverty and more about cultivating an otherwise invisible poverty of spirit of self-denial.
Through his culture of obedience, he wants his friars to outgrow willfulness, and to order their will to God’s higher, eternal will, beyond their ephemeral whims and fancies.
For their screenplay, Rossellini and his co-writer Federico Fellini handpick less than a dozen stories, out of dozens of episodes from the eponymous 14th-century Italian novel, and from another book about Brother Juniper (here, called by his Italian name Ginepro). Like those books, this film brings to life the Franciscans and their early journey as missionaries.
In handpicking episodes, however, the filmmakers show how Christlike they thought Francis was. Here, Francis’s forlorn prayer at night, before he meets a leper in the woods, resembles Christ’s agony in the garden. Brother Ginepro’s silent forbearance under tyrant Nicolai, resembles Christ’s under Pilate. And Francis’s evangelical commission to his friars resembles Christ’s great commission to his apostles.
For such a talkative film, its most stirring scene, Francis’s nocturnal encounter with a leper is wordless. That’s Rossellini’s muted metaphor for God’s union with man. As man, Francis seeks out the leper as he might seek out Christ; he longs to be with his bruised, battered savior.
Francis seeks out the leper just as Christ embraces humans leperously disfigured by sin, and lovingly overcomes his revulsion.
