Luchino Visconti's Hot Bros Before Hos Manifesto

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This is for TFE's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series. 

Click on that link for more! And I suppose I should say there are extensive spoilers ahead but come on the movie's 51 years old.

Luchino Visconti's 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers tells the story of five brothers, their mother, and a whore. Viva Italia! The film begins with a family arriving from the country into Milan after the death of the patriarch to meet the eldest son Vincenzo, who's been living there for some time. Vincenzo wasn't expecting them and their arrival upends his life a bit, especially since they arrive in the middle of his engagement dinner and the two mothers - Vincenzo's and his fiance's - start immediately fighting like banshees. From there it follows the brothers, in chapters named for each of them, as they figure out how to navigate, that is survive, big city life.

Complicating matters, in ways good and bad and ultimately very very bad, is Nadia (Annie Girardot), a sexy lady of the streets who has some uncomplicated fun (at least she tries to keep it uncomplicated) with unstable boxer brother Simone (Renato Salvatore) before moving on to some real romance with his younger brother, the titular Rocco. Rocco's played by Alain Delon, who is shorthand for "Duh, of course she falls for him!" Simone, being unstable and a boxer, doesn't take that too well. Which eventually leads to my favorite shots of the film:

Oh wait, that's just Simone and Rocco taking a shower together. Sorry, I got my pictures mixed all up. How silly of me. Ahem.

As I was saying, Simone doesn't like his former paid-lady tossing him aside for his sibling, and after a good deal of miserable back and forth between the three characters - Rocco, trying to be too saintly and noble for anybody's good, tells Nadia she must go back to Simone; she momentarily does so to spite Rocco but can't maintain it - Simone follows her to the woods where she's turning a trick and pulls a knife on her, resulting in my true favorite shot of the film:

And while I love the shot frozen like that, the beautiful symbolic crucifixion of it all,  all depressing wastelands stretching off into the gray distance, and the lopsided weight of the composition as if the world's tumbling sideways off a cliff, here it is in motion because the full range of motion's lovely to behold as well:

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All of Nadia's eradicated under the giant looming black cloud of Simone save her outstretched arms, swinging up to embrace an end, any end, to the suffering.

But what's most interesting about this moment to me is how Visconti edits it. He cuts away from the above shot to off-scene Rocco for a moment, who's fighting in a boxing match, and then cuts back to this scene and Nadia's silent resignation has been supplanted by hysteria and terror. She is no mournful Christ figure - she is flailing around in the mud, shrieking, while Simone stabs her over and over again.
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It's really very violent and sudden, a shock after the melancholy we'd only just seen envelope her, and it underlines what I think is Visconti's main point: the harsh contrast between the poetic notions we assign to life and the less pretty reality. She thinks for a moment, she poses the pose, thinking that there will be beauty in her succumbing. But there is none. Nadia and Simone and Rocco all want to capital-L live but the world won't let them - they're operatic figures bouncing off the walls of squalid tenements. Roger Ebert said this of the film:

"It is a combination that should not work, but does, between operatic melodrama and seamy social realism, which at no point in its 177-minute running time seem to clash, although they should."

I don't think he's quite right there - I think the whole point is the clash, and it's all they do, and poignantly. Nadia can sweep her arms out with romantic notions of her sacrifice, but she just ends up screeching and dead in the mud.