Two Cents Worth Of Hope

Film can be multiply ephemeral. Not just depicting a time and place but a way of seeing, a way of constructing, and from these mechanisms different forms of loss. Films locked away while there are disputes over rights, lost in vaults where there is descent into rot, left in archives when tastes and habits change. Two Cents Worth Of Hope is perhaps in that latter category, a remastered version screened at the 2021 Edinburgh Film Festival might signal a revival. It's of its time in any number of ways, and all the more charming for it.

It was not neglected at time of release. It shared the prize at Cannes in 1952 with Welles' Othello, its director Renato Castellini may be best known for his own Shakespearean adaptation, the 1954 Romeo & Juliet. It's set in a small village outside Napoli, filmed in the streets and trees of Boscotrecase. "outside Napoli" here meaning on the other side of Vesuvius, nestled into the landscape between the peak and Pompei.

Shot in the Italian neo-realist style, as introduced at EIFF the discussion was of showing the real Italy, free of Fascist romanticism, this though 'neorealisma rosa', "pink", using the techniques in service of romantic comedy. The critic and theorist Andre Bazin was a great champion of the film, describing it as "one of the purest love stories cinema has ever seen". Some change short of seven decades subsequent that description still holds weight.

With a largely amateur cast there is a roughness to a lot of the performance, but it works. Some of that is the distance of time, of language, of black and white, but there's still a charm to it all. The line between the native and the naive is a difficult one, most colonial powers first colonised themselves and Italy is no different. Neapolitan accents are different than Italian, the commune of Boscotrecase a further derivation. There's mention made of speaking as they do in the city, but to ears from elsewhere some of the subtleties will be lost.

The film had first roles for Maria Fiore and Vincenzo Musolino as the courting couple. They would go on to more popular successes. Comedies, musicals, and television for Fiore, the almost mandatory westerns for Musolino. As debuts though these are striking. Nearly literally so, amongst the warnings of age in terms of elements of language is a slap-happiness that is as much of the era as the environment.

This is packed with incident, young Carmela is infatuated with Antonio from when she first sees him. Demobbed in his tank corps uniform, "holding up the fence" at the church. Her pursuit of him is a ruin, the course of true love rarely runs smoothly but this route is as calamitous as the bus service.

There is plenty of comic business, a lot with a physicality that needs no translation. There's a depiction of the cut-throat cinema exhibition trade at one point where even blood is not enough to satisfy. There are throughlines to all the disappointments, the inequalities are genuine, affecting, geographic in the mountainous and monetary senses.

The title "Du Soldi Di Speranza" was then translated as "Two Cents Worth Of Hope". "Du Soldi" does mean two coins, but also in the sense of "pennies". That the English title is potentially a version of Gremillon's 1932 comedy "For One Cent's Worth Of Hope". That another victim of the idiomatic becoming literal, "Pour un Sou d'Amour" seems as likely to be misunderstood with good intent as Quantum of Solace. The subtitles are good, though "Madon" being subtitled as "Jesus" involves an almost heretical level of transformation. It does grab the tone, however, and the film has that in spades.

Antonio and Carmela are fated for each other, and certainly she is ill-fate for he. This is peasant country, so fortunes are rare, but misfortune they have in abundance. There are literal fireworks among the goings-on, but tempers are equally explosive and chemistry is present in every scene. To recount the litany of things to enjoy here is to waste time that could be spent tracking down a copy. My tuppenceworth here is that this is worth seeing, dollars to doughnuts you too will be charmed.