Maria Bello (left), William Hurt, and Kristin Stewart headline "The Yellow Handkerchief," this week's entry for Cinema Sundays at the Charles. For me the real selling-point for this rural-Louisiana road movie is the presence of Udayan Prasad behind the camera. This strong, sensitive director made the prescient, moving British film, "My Son the Fanatic," 13 years ago. None of his work has gotten much push in the U.S. since that tale of an assimilated Pakistani taxi driver in England, who grapples with (among other things) his Islamic-fundamentalist son. With the star-power behind "The Yellow Handkerchief," Prasad should get another shot at winning an international audience.
The best movie in town this week has got to be the latest selection for the Charles' revival series, "Umberto D" (Saturday at noon, Monday at 7 p.m., Thursday at 9 p.m.) In 1952, the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who had already collaborated with Vittorio De Sica on a succession of classics (the best known is "The Bicycle Thief"), declared that he hoped to create a movie so full of "truly significant and revealing" details that it would seem like "90 minutes in the daily life of mankind." That same year, with this film, De Sica and Zavattini came as close as anyone ever has to achieving this goal.
Their eruptively moving "Umberto D.," the story of a debt-ridden retired civil servant who's forced from his home by a cruel landlady, is neorealism at its peak. On the surface, "Umberto D." simply follows the title character, played with a tattered bourgeois hauteur by the retired professor Carlo Battisti, as he and his dog wander through Rome in a futile search for money and fellowship.
But De Sica and Zavattini turn mundane rituals into searing presentations of character. The movie starts with its only panoramic scene: elderly men demanding an increase in their pensions. (The sequence is echoed later in a dog pound.) De Sica tightens his focus so unerringly that the final shot - of Umberto D. playing fetch, trying to win back his dog's alienated affections - is a prodigious expression of modern man's aloneness. It broke my heart. Have you seen De Sica's films? What's your favorite?