Rocco and His Brothers Review: Spectacular Italian Neorealism

Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers, is a breathtaking tapestry of staggering depth and detail, charting the deterioration of a large family in Milan.

Such an early statement in Rocco and His Brothers highlights director Luchino Visconti’s (The Leopard) strong ability to accurately depict working class lives on screen. Over the course of the next three hours, it is a strength that becomes clear time and time again.

All five Parondi brothers—Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, Luca—start on the same level. It makes their various downfalls, successes, or descents into monstrosity that much more effective. After the death of the Parondi father, the sons and their mother, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou, For Whom the Bell Tolls), leave their rural Italian town of Lucania for the Milanese suburb of Lambrate. Their background is one of low income and austerity, which becomes an early sticking point for Vincenzo’s (Spiros Focás, A Matter of Time) new fiancee, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale, 8½). The Parondi family eventually find a single room apartment, the six of them stuffing into a space not fit for that many people.

Rocco and His Brothers is told across five chapters, each focussing on a particular brother, but with arcs that branch out and collide with other characters. Their experience of life in 1960s Milan is fraught, and their gradual deterioration as an initially strong family unit is both subtle and heartbreaking. When we first meet the Parondi’s, they marvel at the industrial suburb of Lambrate with awe and excitement, with Visconti and his DOP Giuseppe Rotunno (All That Jazz) capturing the characters via wide shots in this new place of possibilities. Shots of manual labour, such as window cleaning, also linger on their subjects, emphasising the collision of wealth and development with widespread poverty.

The next 177 minutes are nothing short of extraordinary, with gorgeous set and production design that vividly captures the homely atmosphere that, initially at least, surrounds the Parondi family. It is a life that bubbles with the good and the bad. There are many subplots in Rocco and His Brothers, but the main conflict arises between Simone (Renato Salvatori, Z) and his siblings. A prostitute called Nadia (Annie Girardot, Three Rooms in Manhattan) initially strikes up a casual relationship with Simone, before forming something much deeper and more beautiful with Rocco (Alain Delon, Le Samouraï) later. Nadia’s general malaise with her life is squashed by Rocco and the love they share. Here, Visconti offers hope to these struggling characters, before quashing it with events that are difficult to watch, but not included for the sake of cruelty.

This plotline involving Simone, Nadia and Rocco is frustratingly handled at times. Rocco’s insistence at trying to find the good in Simone, even after his horrific actions, is meant to be infuriating, but it feels misplaced within Delon’s generally decent and well-intentioned character. Ciro Parondi (Max Cartier, L’assassino) alludes to this in a scene late in Rocco and His Brothers, offering hope to the youngest brother, Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi, The Hunchback of Rome), yet for all of Visconti’s well-drawn character work, this particular plotline feels outdated and questionable.

However, Visconti never creates sympathy for Simone. Like in Raging Bull (1980), the descent into violence and dangerous masculinity is posited solely as something toxic. Despite this occasionally frustrating plot of Rocco and His Brothers, it is never anything but a dense and chastening text of family dynamics, modernisation, classism, and immigration.

The re-release of Rocco and His Brothers will be out in cinemas in the UK & Ireland on January 3, 2025, with an extended run at BFI Southbank as part of the January season “Luchino Visconti: Decadence & Decay.”