Director Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders

It took me a while – even as long as the next day – to appreciate this film. The characters are not sympathetic – the private faces behind charming social façades – and the scenes and dialogue are somehow jarring and ill at ease. But I guess that’s the point.

A couple, obliged to spend time together on their own in a foreign land, discover that they have grown apart and maybe don’t even like each other any more. They are disoriented – in their surroundings and in their marriage. Lots of stereotypes: uptight northern Europeans encounter the land of voluble Mediterraneans. The beautiful, sunny south, full of fecundity and the inevitability of death. She is touched by a sense of history and past lives and regrets not having had a child; he is cynical and arrogant, attempting to have a fling but being rejected/rejecting the chance. The climax is a visit to Pompeii to watch the unearthing of a couple who died in each other’s arms 2,000 years before (very “Arundel Tomb”); as they return to Naples, discussing divorce, they are held up in a religious procession where their own personal miracle takes place.

And then the film grew on me. The way the landscapes and the ancient sites are used to affect and reflect the characters’ emotions. Why should they be portrayed as sympathetic when we see them at their most private and conflicted, immersed in tedium and unhappiness? The dialogue seems stilted – but real interlocution is not scripted. It made me think of Antonioni – even to the way the female character (usually Monica Vitti) is suspended between the timeless natural world and the superficial social whirl.