A Scene from "Umberto D" (De Sicca, 1952)

Throughout the runtime of De Sicca’s neorealist film “Umberto D”, we watch helplessly as an elderly Umberto struggles with his growing financial crisis and impending destitution, all the while bearing the brunt of an almost completely solitary existence. His tribulations seem to know no end. As if the threat of eviction and the sudden emergence of a (possibly psychosomatic) fever aren’t enough, he has to survive by selling off family heirlooms one by one. His dog is taken up by the dog pound and is almost executed. Groping his way through all these ordeals, he finds company in the sole person of Maria, his housemaid. His scenes with her establish them as having a warm rapport. To Maria, Umberto is the wise and benevolent father figure. She is the loving child that he never had.

One of the most significant sequences of the film focuses on Maria’s own loneliness. This seems somewhat jarring to us, since until then we have automatically identified Maria with the role of Umberto’s calming spirit, or, as it were, the much needed Yin to our grumbling protagonist’s Yang; most of the comic relief in the film comes from her. And yet, about thirty minutes in, we get an exclusive, voyeuristic peek at her daily morning routine.

The scene starts in the wee hours of the day, with a rather highly strung Umberto calling the local clinic to send over someone to take him to the hospital. Maria’s small figure is seen getting up in the background. Umberto leaves the frame, and this time, we focus on Maria instead. Her eyes gaze upwards at the ceiling; a lone cat totters along the high glass roof. Maria sleepily sits with her head in her hands, and mutters what seems to be a line from a song. She gets up and enters the kitchen; a profile shot of her shows her lighting a match against a patch of wall that has been inundated with scratches made over years of drudgery. Suddenly, Umberto’s problems seem to pale in comparison. She walks over to the window, and once more sees the white cat, a dream that appears to be too good and too distant to be attainable. For a moment, she seems to have been transported somewhere else; Umberto, her client, friend and guardian of several years, is leaving with an illness, possibly for good. She is about to become the mother of a child whose father has yet to be identified. Her employer and her friends, like the ants above the sink, indulge in meaningless bourgeois pursuits and ignore her completely. She now comes back to the present and turns away from the window, her eyes moist. She walks over to a small rotary machine, and starts grinding away at her pain. Silent tears stream out, and she stretches her petite body to shut the door, unable to turn her back to her duty for a second.

Perhaps the scene, apart from providing a glimpse into Maria’s character, also serves to universalize Umberto’s misery. Refraining from a regression to the final shot of a faceless Roman crowd at the end of bicycle thieves, De Sicca resorts to filming the inside of a filthy kitchen, an image that conjures up a much more intimate association with the suffering of the people of Italy, and of the lower class in general.