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Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis is a paradoxical experience. A film whose mythologized subject matter and strict, matter-of-fact style are at odds with one another, it is a fictional depiction of the legends and folklore (the ‘Fioretti’ or ‘little flowers’) of Italy’s patron saint that strives for documentary realism. Despite the contradiction, the film succeeds in creating its portrait of an uncomplicated and benevolent world in servitude to God. Film historian Adriano Aprà puts it best:

“It’s as if the light of the Holy Spirit had settled over Earth once and for all, and Rossellini, almost as if making a documentary, filmed this enchanted, harmonious and serene reality, a reality that, when addressing the issues of his time, he could never find.”

This “reality” still remains unfound. When viewed from today’s political climate, one cannot help but sometimes see the behavior of St. Francis, Brother Ginepro and their fellow brothers (all played with palpable altruism by real Catholic monks) as just plain dumb. They bumble around in a deserted landscape with childish faces full of wonder, having conversations with seasonal birds à la Snow White. They exist within a vacuum, cut off from any influence of war and famine of the Middle Ages; highly ideal conditions to develop and sustain such blind, unwavering faith in a transparent deity. However, isolating them from the real world was a conscious decision on Rossellini’s part, serving much more of an aesthetic purpose than a narrative one. This decision establishes an environment film historian Peter Brunette sees as “functioning, like medieval art, symbolically, as an emblematic community of the possible.”

What helps make this community seem possible is the film’s lack of traditional narrative structure. There is no arc here, no internal conflict and very little external conflict. Rossellini chooses to preserve the Fioretti as unadulterated vignettes, delicately accentuating moments in the fabled life of St. Francis and his Order of Friars Minor. The strong degree to which each fable construes St. Francis and his crew as divinely holistic is balanced by Rossellini’s inconspicuous, almost invisible photographic style. We see and hear things for what they are. There are no overt, artificial suggestions of a spiritual presence. What Rossellini wants us to take from the film is not a religious awakening but a renewed conviction in good deeds and humanity. Ultimately, St. Francis is transformed from a hollow, theological figure into a rich, human example of good intention.

Henri Agel describes Rossellini’s technique in The Flowers of St. Francis as an “aesthetic of insignificance,” a style that favors poetic moments over rising action and is characteristic of Rossellini’s neorealist beginnings. It is this humanization of a cherished holy figure and his unadorned, neorealist representation that makes the film refreshing and even mildly radical. “It was important for me then to affirm everything that stood against slyness and cunning,” Rossellini once said about the film. “In other words, I believed then and still believe that simplicity is a very powerful weapon.” Unique for a shamelessly religious film, The Flowers of St. Francis comes across without a single air of pretension. It does not contrive to change its viewer’s beliefs, nor does it elevate its subject into supernatural supremacy. St. Francis, and more importantly his message of leading an earnest life, are given a gentle exaltation in a rather convincing documentary fashion. Simplicity will always do the trick.

This review originally appeared in DenverProjectionBooth.blogspot.com in April 2008.

One of my favorite movies of all time, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS is one of the few movies I can think of that photographs the beauty of the human soul. Rossellini’s neo-realist style combined with the clownish sensibilities of Frederico Fellini create something so beautiful it almost defies description. The very faces of the monks have so many different emotions in them, it practically encompasses what Bergman said about the human face being the great subject of cinema. If that’s the case, then Rossellini has filmed a true masterpiece in this movie.