The Flowers of St. Francis Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie but since it was included in the ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’ list, I thought I might as well check it out. In fact, it was the very first movie directed by Roberto Rossellini that I have seen so far and, hopefully, I will watch much more of his work in the near future. The first interesting thing about this movie was that, even though it seemed deeply pious, Rossellini was not really a religious man himself. In fact, back then right when he was making this movie, there was this huge scandal as he was having a baby with Ingrid Bergman while they were still both married with other people. I guess, Rossellini was a little bit like me in the sense that, even if he wasn’t really religious, he thought that religion was a fascinating subject. Still, even if this movie was intriguing, it was never really fascinating though. I mean, I did appreciate its focus on the purest form of Catholicism but, in my opinion, its episodic form prevented it from really developing St. Francis as a character and also as a concept. Sure, it was faithful to the book it was based from, ‘Little Flowers of St. Francis’ which was based on more than 50 episodic chapters but I just didn’t care much for this approach. It was still a fine piece Italian neo-realism though and I was amazed to discover afterwards that the characters were not played by actors but by actual Franciscan monks. Apparently, Rossellini usually preferred to work with non-professional actors and, in this case, it did work fine. Anyway, to conclude, even though it is not a really easy movie to digest, it was still an interesting watch and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.