Embark on exotic and inner exploration
Romantic travel movie in Italian style
Author: Wang Tian (Associate Professor, Communication University of China)
Movies and travel often evoke similar emotions, transporting us to the past as well as to distant places. This is especially true for romantic travel films, where exotic settings can play a fickle cupid and stories can take place anywhere. For romantic travel movies, there may be no place that makes travelers and audiences look forward to it as much as Italy.
Picture of the Spanish Steps in the movie Roman Holiday
"Mantra of Truth" profile image from Roman Holiday
Data picture of St. Mark's Square in Venice in Sunny Days
Romance: The Promise of the Eternal City
Cities in movies are often combined with genre. For example, in London's cinematic topography, the East End is basically regarded as a pre-modern concept of space, attracting the attention of fantasy and horror film directors. The West End, by contrast, presents a global London in the form of romantic comedy. While Italian cities and landscapes are highly praised for their unique charm, cities such as Rome, Venice and Florence preserve the country's history, passion and values, and their architectural heritage continues a precious stylistic landscape, making them the best places in the genre of romantic travel movies.
A good romantic travel movie starts with a romantic location. Nordic Stockholm is one such list, and when the city enters the narrative, one immediately thinks of the painful characters, lengthy scenes and gloomy relationships of Bergman's films. The best place where the story takes place is a sunny city, but not all sunshine cities are suitable for romance. One example is Bertolucci's The Sheltered Sky (1990), a beautifully photographed travel film full of quirky adventures, but the tents and shuttered houses of North African towns are far less atmospheric than the meadows of Tuscany or the squares of Venice.
Set in Venice, Sunny Days (1955), a nearly stylized sweet scene of the romantic travel film genre, an Italian man stretches his hand from a small canal in Venice—trying to grab a gardenia that an American woman has fallen from a bridge and slips through his hand. In the 1950s, Italian tenor Rossano Brazze played the hero — the owner of a small antique shop in Venice, and the famous Hollywood actress Catherine Hepburn played an American middle school teacher who came to Venice to spend her first summer trip to Italy in search of "what is missing in life". The director is the famous David Lane, from the desert in "Lawrence of Arabia" to the forest in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" to Venice in "Sunny Days", he clearly has a soft spot for romantic travel.
The music of Vivaldi and Rossini flowing in the background, the crowds in the square, the pigeons, the scent of cappuccino wafting from the café, the gardenia that Braz bought for Hepburn – Sunny Days shows the basic elements of all romantic travel movies. Known as the "most beautiful square in the world", St. Mark's Square blends Eastern and Western architectural features such as Baroque and Byzantium, and there is all the dramatic tension between the protagonists that combine different cultural backgrounds, and a cute little Italian boy plays cupid messenger.
In fact, from the first narrative film, The Battle of Rome (1905), early Italian cinema established its international reputation by revisiting the country's artistic traditions, and Rome's historical background is the most natural of all cities. Thus in the first decade of the 20th century, a precious and "outdated" Italy emerged untouched by modern industrialism, films that tell the story while highlighting the beauty of architecture and picturesque scenery.
By the 1950s, the "Eternal City" was still in charge. Roman Holiday (1953) casts the classic again. The innocent princess, played by Audrey Hepburn, has a brief love affair with a journalist played by the mature Gregory Pike. The couple get to know each other at many of the city's famous attractions, and "Mantra" provides a comedic effect: the reporter explains to the princess that people's hands can be put in stone mouths to test their honesty, and if they lie, their hands will be swallowed by stone mouths. The reporter put his hand in the stone mouth and pretended that his hand was bitten by the stone mouth, and the princess was frightened and laughed like a little girl. Since then, countless fans have come to visit "Mantra mouth" and relive this classic scene. As the holidays march and the princess must return to royal responsibilities, a romantic travel interlude ends, but summer Rome becomes eternal in the hearts of the audience.
Going Far Away: A Freely Expressed Personality
Cities are like people – certain periods represent the pinnacle of their careers. Many cities have their own golden ages, such as Paris in the 1920s and Los Angeles in the 1940s. In terms of pure dynamism and style, no city has been as hub for creativity and passion for the world's younger generation as London in the 1960s. Rome Holiday, shot in Rome in the 1950s, along with other films, helped shape Rome and the term "romance" that originated in the city, making Italy the first choice for romantic travel films.
After the end of World War II, against the backdrop of a booming international travel, going to Italy in search of romance could happen to anyone, so it was natural for filmmakers to consider the box office potential of cross-cultural romance. Sometimes, though, cultural distance can be a huge chasm that destroys romantic love. For example, in "Life and Death Love" (1955), the two characters have to fight because of the cultural prejudice that "the East is the East, the West is the West". From Rebel Blood (1953) to The South Pacific (1958), cultural differences sometimes cast an insurmountable wall over romantic expectations of "living happily ever after."
As a result, romantic travel movies have many thematic variations, such as the British romantic travel movies, like many other films in the UK, are full of barriers between different classes. Set in Florence's Room with a View (1985), a group of Edwardian Britons maintained the habit of drinking afternoon tea, dressed in completely different costumes from the locals. Yet Italy differs so much from Britain, with the former's bright climate and Latin flair so diametrically opposed to the latter that it seems difficult for the British to fall in love with someone who transcends their own identity or the country of Italy. The Tuscan sun is also unlikely to make helena Bonham Carter's character meet a passionate local, but the mountain-fringed city offers her enough of a Renaissance vibe.
For travelers, the most indifferent Italian city seems to be Venice too. For example, the story of "Broken Venice" (1971) is set on a summer on the island of Lido before World War I, when the local plague broke out. Italian film maestro Visconti spent most of his life adapting the almost impossible adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann's novel. Gustav, a nervous but highly successful German composer, came to Venice with the pain of the loss of his daughter, and his life was controlled by reason, perfection, balance and morality, while the beauty of a teenager gave birth to his sensibility. Gustav was weakened by his secret feelings and wanted to leave but eventually died of cholera. In Venice Mystery (1973), beauty and death conspire again, completely foiling the romance of Venice. The seasons filmed in this film, autumn and winter, make Venice shrouded in a gloomy and surreal atmosphere, and also make the protagonist's "romantic journey" full of ominous feelings. In Bloom in Love (1973), the hero leaves the hilltop forest of Los Angeles and travels to Venice, wandering among the crowds of St. Mark's Square, eager to come back from the dead of a failed marriage. Yet this legendary square is indifferent, mocking his self-indulgent inner dilemma.
Few cities, like Venice, unknowingly display things that symbolize the glory of yesteryear. Gilded mosaics on the façade of St. Mark's Basilica, painterly church paintings by artists, trophies of commerce and conquest, the stage for feasts and carnivals in the grand square, all of this seduces filmmakers, who work with the same passion as the cityscape painter Canaletto. What is truly alluring, however, is perhaps the hidden melancholy of the city—nothing is eternal, whether it's the city or love.
In fact, audiences across generations may have different answers to "what is a good romantic travel movie" question. Older audiences love Out of Africa (1985), starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, though the pain of Kenyan lions and characters may have undermined romance; younger generations like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpe's Love at Dawn (1995), an American and a Frenchman who meet and fall in love on a train. Born in the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, this generation had a strong subjective will and a consumerist lifestyle, but suffered the global financial crisis and economic recession of the early 21st century. Los Angeles-based contemporary love story City of Philharmonic (2016) both transforms classical Hollywood music with "modern survival" and rewrites the classic romance of Casablanca with "modern anxiety."
Travelers, like audiences entering a movie theater, carry with them their full personality. Exotic places take people out of their conventional environment and life, giving these personalities a wide range of freedom of expression. The remoteness and brevity of travel can encourage us to reinvent ourselves temporarily, and travelers can become actors on the stage of exotic cities, putting on hunting costumes in Kenya, pastime on cruise ships, or lurking in Budapest cafes like spies in fiction. Sometimes the story in a romantic travel movie is the best thing after reality, and sometimes it's undoubtedly better than reality. But as long as romantic travel movies exist, travelers and audiences will always want to explore on their own.
Guangming Daily (13th edition, November 4, 2021)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily