Next up on the Letterboxd Challenge is “Italian Neo-Realism.” I gave the list of available movies to my wife, and she picked this one, because “it looked the least depressing.” Which is, I guess, maybe accurate, but also: not saying very much, as it turns out.

So this is actually a weird movie for the genre filter because it’s like 50% neorealism, and 50% pulpy unrealism.

On the neorealism front, it’s a movie about the women who worked as temporary agriculture labourers to harvest rice in Italy in 1948, and it makes no bones about the reality of their poverty (and the even more desperate poverty of the “illegals” who don’t have government contracts to work in the rice fields, but are tagging along anyway in the hope they can pick up the work on worse terms from semi-criminal bosses). And in neo-realist style, the movie informs us that all the interiors and exteriors actually are filmed in that place, rather than on a studio set.

But on the pulpy front, this is the story of a couple who just pulled off a jewel theft, where the woman goes along with the rice workers to hide from the cops, and about her relationship with her thieving boyfriend, a rice worker woman she sorta-kinda befriends, and a sergeant in the Italian army, and all the consequences that ensue from that theft.

The fact that the movie is about all these women is its own mix of neorealism and pulp, really. Like, it is a very unflinching look at the kind of hard labor demanded from these women, with a radio announcer intro talking about how “only women” can do this brutal labor in a way that must have been the director foregrounding the sexist attitudes behind this. And the movie is often very matter-of-fact about the realities of life for these women.

But then… it’s also pulpy as hell about this, relishing women walking around in the dorm in their underclothes, and at one point there’s a scene that is simultaneously a riot about union labor and a bunch of women engaging in mud wrestling, and the director is clearly leaning into both sides of this. And one of the female leads, Silvana, is basically filmed as a kind of sex goddess here. (True story: She ends up marrying producer Dino De Laurentiis, and Giada is her granddaughter.) The movie isn’t as horny as this contemporary NYT review from 1950 thinks it is — I feel like that review is a good reminder of how radically different European and American cultural norms used to be, and how European cinema was received in the US back then — but it’s still pretty horny.

Ultimately, I feel like this pulp/neorealism fusion thing works surprisingly well. While you’re taking in this kind of quasi-documentary about agricultural labor conditions, it goes down easy with a pulpy crime story and love triangle in the mix; and where the plot gets a little too slick and melodramatic, there’s this realism to keep it grounded. Real peanut butter/chocolate energy. I hadn’t heard of this movie before we watched it (though apparently it did get a Criterion Blu-ray release in 2016 and a wave of new reviews then), but if you’re looking for something that feels like a transitional fossil between Bicycle Thieves and La Dolce Vita, recommended.