The Children Are Watching Us

Little Prico's mother leaves the house one day and goes off with another man. Then she comes back. The father takes her in and nothing gets better. The boy watches all of it; he does not understand it but he records everything. The family sends him from one place to another, nobody explains anything to him, and the film leaves him alone at the end. Vittorio De Sica directed. It was his first work with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the two of whom would sit at the centre of Italian neorealism in the years that followed. Zavattini called it the most important stage in the evolution of his career as a filmmaker and even as a human being. It was shot in the summer of 1942, the last calm stretch before the war turned fully bad for Italy. It was meant to open in 1943 but only came out partially, and was lost in the confusion as the country split and collapsed that September. Visconti's Ossessione met the same fate. Both films drew attention for the same reason: unlike the lighter product of the period they dealt with adultery head-on, a serious transgression in a Fascist Italy obsessed with the family. It is usually classified as protoneorealist, because traces of the sentimentality of Fascist-era cinema are still in it. Who it is for: viewers who want to see where neorealism came from and who like family drama told from a child's position. Who it is not for: anyone wanting distance. The film uses the boy's pain directly and leaves no consolation in its final scene.