Film Forum

FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO
Italy, 1950
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Co-written by Federico Fellini
Starring Aldo Fabrizi, Gianfranco Bellini, Peparuolo
In Italian with English subtitles.
Approx. 87 min. 35mm/4K restoration.  

Rossellini’s account of a brief period in the life of Saint Francis is as plainspoken and modest as its subject, an anti-hagiography closer to the mud below than the heavens above. Loosely inspired by Fioretti di San Francesco, a nearly-contemporaneous 14th-century collection of vignettes, the film was shaped into a bare ‘scenario’ by Rossellini and Federico Fellini, but the final result remains bracingly plotless. A series of parables that illustrate the moral quality of its characters rather than any scriptural interpretation, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS is built from incidents and yarns: an encounter with a leper, a visit from Saint Clare, the quest for a pig’s foot, and the tale of the brother who keeps giving away his clothes. Francis is played by Brother Nazario Gerardi and the ranks of his disciples are populated by real-life monks that Rossellini featured in PAISAN; the only professional actor in sight is Aldo Fabrizi, with an extended cameo as a preening warlord. Financed by a credulous publisher who believed Rossellini would deliver a devout testament whose debut would coincide with the papally declared ‘Holy Year’ of 1950, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS instead premiered in the aftermath of Rossellini’s unsaintly and adulterous dalliance with Ingrid Bergman. The initial critical reaction was indifferent, but Rossellini had the last laugh; in 1995, the Vatican named THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS among fifteen essential works of religious cinema.

35mm print courtesy Cinecittà. 4K restoration courtesy Janus Films.  

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“Leave it to Roberto Rossellini, the Italian Neo-Realist pioneer with his country’s postwar wounds still bleeding, to come up with cinema’s purest, least cynical vision of faith as a way of viewing and receiving the world around us.”
– Slant Magazine