Postcards from Venice

Smog

A fine retrospective program, Questi Fantasmi, collects a couple dozen postwar Italian films that never achieved much notice, shouldered out of attention by master directors and high-low genres like the spaghetti western, horror film and mythical epic. One startling discovery was this 1962 film, directed by Franco Rossi, in which an Italian lawyer (Enrico Maria Salerno) spends a day in Los Angeles between flights. He goes to an art gallery, a bowling alley, a posh party and befriends all manner of Italians, two of them played Renato Salvatori and Annice Girardot, who had appeared in the 1960 Italo hit Rocco and His Brothers (whose title in on a marquee Girardot drives past). He wanders through a desolate Hollywood, mixes with the swells in Pasadena, sees mom-and-pop oil derricks in Culver City that, Salvatori says, "stretch from here to San Diego." It's a fascinating document of L.A. dolce vita, and of a city emerging from its legend, as seen by wise foreign eyes. Smog was the brightest surprise of this year's Biennale.