Miracle in Milan

MIRACLE IN MILAN   ***

Vittorio De Sica

1951

IDEA:  Influenced by the resilient spirit of his late adoptive mother, an orphan in postwar Italy rallies a colony of displaced people against the greedy businessmen trying to seize their land.

BLURB:  If fantasy entails, on a primal level, the imagining of desired circumstances unsupportable by reality - as well as an attendant willful disavowal of their impossible realization - then Miracle in Milan is fantasy of the highest order. Taking cues from Chaplin, magical realism, and Hollywood escapism, De Sica and Zavattini craft their film as a fable of brazen wish fulfillment constantly teetering on the edge of collapse. In the first, less overtly quixotic half of its bifurcated structure, the film offers up images that cannily braid optimism and despair, as in the sight of vagrants huddled together under a lone ray of sunshine. While the predominant mode of jocular, even lavish tragicomedy departs quite sharply from the neorealism for which De Sica is best known, he and Zavattini remain attuned to the social realities of postwar Italy, particularly the ways in which the economic “miracle” and its proliferating structures of capitalism militated against the underclasses. The rollicking, at times cartoonish blitheness of much of Miracle in Milan is ultimately inseparable from the gravity of the material poverties with which it concerns itself. As the film charges through its second act, an escalating parade of whimsical interventions and outlandish escapes, the hyperbolic fantasy has the pointed effect of underscoring the direness of the conditions that prompted it. By the time the film’s dispossessed community is blowing away police grenade smoke with its collective breath - and certainly by the flight-by-broomstick denouement - one is struck by an ambivalent mixture of elevation and melancholy, a vacillating attitude toward a world that often warrants our most stubborn illusions.