This beautiful little film, rarely seen outside of archives, is a semi-documentary, semi-dramatic story set in Venice. There are essentially four characters. Daniele (Ugo Gracci) works on a dredger clearing the "Canal of the Angels" so that larger ships can pass through, saving them local navigation time. He is married to Anna (Anna Ariani) and they have a little son Bruno (Pino Locchi). An out-of-work sailor called "the captain" (Maurizio D'Ancora) works temporarily as a uniformed vaporetto ticket-taker before being assigned to a ship. They each display a loneliness and a strong a desire for companionship and affection. Daniele's leg is injured in an accident and he is out of commission for a few weeks. Anna meets "the captain" at a fair and where the two go to the dance pavilion together and later spend some time in a semi-romance as the woman's husband is recuperating from his injury. It is clear she is smitten by him. All this is taken in by the young Bruno who has a clear apprehension over the his mother's behavior and senses something is amiss, much like the boy Pricò in De Sica's later "The Children Are Watching Us", which also had a wife seeking romance outside of her marriage, though here it never fully progresses to the same tragic consequences of the later film. Bruno gets ill (like Pricò, whose real illness is fear of abandonment by a mother he loves.) When the mother announces at dinner that she is going out for a few minutes, we wonder, as does the boy, whether she will return to diner or go off with her sailor. His ship passes through the cleared canal; the mother returns, the family is together and happy. The personal drama is never fully developed , remains on the surface, and yet it has an almost fable-like force. The background elements often dominate. Francesco Pasinetti had and would garner a great deal of esteem for his documentaries on Venice such as "Piazza San Marco" and this was his only real film with actors and a story, schematic as it is. Much of the film has a visual lyricism that suggests parts of Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante." The excellent photography of the canals, alleys, and dock areas of Venice was done by Giulio De Luca. Director Pasinetti died in 1949 at age 37. This film is probably his finest achievement. More than a cinematic trifle, it is a remarkable visual poem.
Review of Il canale degli angeli
