The Golden Coach

Like the gilded conveyance of its title, The Golden Coach is a magnificent vehicle for Anna Magnani. Shot in jewel-toned color and paced to the graceful rhythms of Vivaldi, the film revolves around Magnani’s Camilla, the star of a commedia dell’arte troupe playing colonial Peru in the eighteenth century. The vivacious Camilla is courted by three suitors: an actor, a bullfighter, and a viceroy. But her passion lives on the stage, where “you become another person, your true self.” In Renoir’s dazzling construction, the screen becomes a proscenium, a frame for the splendid artifice of the theater and for Magnani herself.