A beautiful film about childhood, quite restrained in its telling but very successful as a tearjerker. The film begins with the British Consul in Florence (Anthony Quayle) at his wife’s deathbed deciding how he’s going to tell the news to his children. He decides on telling the oldest, Andrew, who he feels can handle it, but not the youngest, Miles, who is not yet in school and, in his view, more sensitive, like his mother. This decision results in structural miscommunication in this otherwise loving family to the point that Andrew, who dearly loves his father, gets so little attention that he begins to feel unwanted. According to Michel Ciment in one of the extras, the film was damned at Cannes for being too popular. Ciment offers an interesting critique of film critics arguing that they devote too much time to theme and too little to mise-en-scene. He argues that opera is melodrama and critics of opera would never think of restricting their critique to the libretto, yet how film critics often damn melodrama without dealing seriously with the direction, which Ciment finds to be perfect in INCOMPRESSO, as do I. Milo, the younger son is depicted with all the freedom from restraint that Tootie is in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, just as sharp and equally capable of wickedness. The absent mother is figured regularly through the house the family inhabit, absent, but with constant reminders through décor, paintings, forgotten messages, and a much-valued recording of her reading Eliot’s THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK. The first scene had me welling, and in spite of all the humour in the film, I remained that way until the end, when the floodgates opened. David Cairns has an excellent video essay on the depiction of Childhood in Comencini films, A CHILD’S HEART. The film is based on a Victorian novel by Florence Montgomery published in 1869. It was remade in Hollywood as MISUNDERSTOOD (Jerry Schatzberg, 1983) with Gene Hackman in the Quayle part.

José Arroyo