“The confrontation between intelligence and animal instinct, between reasoning and brute force ... without artistry and style, it becomes vulgar butchery, and it's merely disgusting and cruel.”
- Francesco Rosi
Sometimes the subject matter of a film can present an obstacle to judging it fairly. I felt myself faced with this issue when I started watching Criterion's new release of Francesco Rosi's The Moment of Truth (1965) because the mere idea of bullfighting appalls me. And yet, as Rosi gets beneath the skin of the subject, I found my reservations disappearing and my appreciation of the film growing.
In the late '50s and early '60s, Rosi made a series of powerful films set in southern Italy, dealing with the influence of organized crime and political corruption on the lives of the people there, subjects which he would return to again in later years. But after his masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano (1962), he was uncertain what subject to tackle next. What he eventually settled on, with the support of the publisher Angelo Rizzoli as executive producer, was bullfighting in Spain.
The Moment of Truth differs from Rosi's earlier work in several ways, most notably in the use of colour for the first time, but also significantly in its setting in a country and culture distanced from Rosi's familiar home ground. On a superficial level, Rosi seems to resort to cliches to deal with the unfamiliarity of the material. The bare bones narrative shares obvious elements with previous melodramas using bullfighting as a backdrop, most notably the various versions of Blood and Sand produced in Hollywood from the 1909 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.
Miguel Romero (Miguel Mateo) is the restless son of a farmer struggling to survive in a remote, parched area of Spain. He decides to seek his fortune in Barcelona, but finds that his tenuous contacts there can't help him to find work. After months, earning little, unable to get ahead, he sees a poster for a famous matador in a bar and realizes that such a celebrity can make very large sums of money; so he trains as a torero and begins to make a name for himself, until eventually he achieves fame and fortune.
In the four decades since the film was made, it seems to have been largely ignored, or garnered very little critical favour, because of the perceived cliches. And yet, a film is often far more than the sum of its surface elements, and this is the case with The Moment of Truth; the “what” of the story is less important than the “how” of the telling. Rosi had a fine eye for social detail and this film is far richer than a synopsis can convey, while the lush photography perhaps disguises to some degree the director's neo-realist approach. As in his previous works, here Rosi reveals the ways in which social and economic forces constrain and shape an individual's life.
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