One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America is showing on MUBI starting January 17, 2021 in the UK and other countries.
An aged David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro) peers through a surreptitious hole in the wall, the same vantage that had provided a prying view of his adolescent crush as a teenager. His memorial glance initiates the primary flashback of Sergio Leone’s 1984 gangster opus Once Upon a Time in America, illustrating and expanding his recollection of bloodshed and betrayal, ambition and avarice, success and failure. Complemented by Ennio Morricone’s mournful score, the film’s lingering sense of impermanence is partly due to Noodles’s criminal lifestyle and the resulting confluence of dangerous impropriety and heedless desire, but it also stems from this present-day position, imbued with a haunting, contemplative hindsight embodied by the elder protagonist. What’s more, the foreign perspective of Leone and his Italian collaborators lend Once Upon a Time in America a fabled dimension, a detached yet emboldened point of view: “I can’t see America any other way than with a European’s eyes,” the director stated. Perception and its varied foundations are thus critical to the film, from its own making to its overarching narrative and its visual concentration. Not only do characters often gaze in penetrating close up—lustily at women, suspiciously at rivals—but the picture as a whole presents a brutal vision of the American dream, littered with corpses and broken souls and presumably seen through the vivid, fragmentary mind’s eye of Noodles (“It’s just the way I see things,” he says near the end of the film, recalling past conflict). We are also perhaps guided by Noodles’s opium-induced delirium as a young man, which questions the validity of depicted prior exploits and the ambiguous events still to come. Returning to New York City after decades away, Noodles is asked what he has been doing all that time. “Been going to bed early,” he replies. He’s an older man, yes, but the answer also suggests a preference for the dream state, where past and present and truth and fiction can merge and overlap, blurring overt distinctions while illuminating Leone’s own vantage on a uniquely American illusion: “The most beautiful thing is that in America, without any notice, suddenly, dream becomes reality, reality becomes dream. That’s the thing that touches me the most.”