The Movies.........Roseannas Grave/For Roseanna

Number three in the Ady top five (incidentally, I am not ranking these.....it's tough enough just to pick the buggers!) is another one that few people have heard of. Although much more recent than City Lights, it could hardly be called mainstream; but to those happy few who know of it, it is quiet, understated little sachet of beauty.
On the face of things; the storyline seems sooooo morbid. An Italian couple - very much in love - are facing the dreadful reality that the wife is suffering from a terminal heart condition. The dying womans only wishes are for her husbands happiness, and for her to be buried in the grave next to their daughter who died some years before. Isn't that a laugh a bloody minute?!!
In actual fact, what we get is a touching, funny, and at times heart-wrenchingly emotional story. The town graveyard is filling up fast, with only three plots left - and with the chances of his wife getting her dying wish fading fast - the man spends his days patrolling the town in a valiant effort to keep everyone alive! He runs into gangsters, suicides, fake suicides, amorous mistresses, frozen dead bodies, and a bitter millionaire with the power to sell land to the church to extend the graveyard - thus ensuring the wifes final wish is granted; but why doesn't he??!..........
So we have the storyline, and we have the zany - if a little black - comedy; but surely that's not enough. What else? What is it that elevates it? What is it that makes me misty-eyed to think of it? It is one simple word.......and that word.......is love. If there was ever a movie-marriage I would want, this is it. Throughout the story, I am sucked in by their openness, their partnership, their positivity, their humour, their honesty, their empathy, their deep knowledge of and respect for each other, and their childish exuberance at just being alive, and being together. It is quite beautiful. They form a unit that has resolve so strong nothing can diminish it, not even death. (As a shaker of spears once wisely said.......'love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds'..........hell yes!).
Scenes of the couple sitting on a hill overlooking the village, and the mother sat in the graveyard talking to her daughter steal the heart; for the record may I say that if I had a woman who talked about me the way she does about her husband at that moment I would be.....well.......chuffed is not the word but you get the general idea.
We know that the story is going to reach an inevitable conclusion - no miracle cures here - but rather than grief, I am left with an impression of the truest of loves; two people who want to make every single day of their lives count, and a man who will do anything to make his wifes dreams come true. I ask you, who can fail to be moved by that?
.......as usual when I write about one of these films.......I now want to watch it again!!