To grapple with a film like "The Flowers of St. Francis" is to grapple with the very idea of cinematic narrative as we have always conceived it. Released in 1950, in the midst of the long wave of Neorealism that he himself had christened with the fire and blood of Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini performs a U-turn that left his most dogmatic exegetes, especially those of a Marxist bent, dumbfounded. Abandoning (in appearance) the chronicle of post-war devastation, the director retreats to the 13th century to film not the life of Saint Francis, but the incarnation of his spirit. Not a biopic, then, but a cinematic poem; not a drama, but a series of epiphanies. The work is a filmic object so anomalous and radical that, even today, it seems to have arrived from a parallel universe in which cinema followed an entirely different evolutionary trajectory, one less interested in plot and more in contemplation.

The film's structure is its first, and most audacious, act of rupture. Adapting eleven episodes from the Little Flowers of St. Francis and the Life of Brother Juniper, Rossellini and his young co-screenwriter, a certain Federico Fellini (whose picaresque touch and love for acrobats and God's fools are already palpable), reject any conventional narrative arc. The film has no beginning, middle, and end. It is, rather, a string of pearls, eleven tableaux vivants that follow one another not with the logic of dramatic causality, but of spiritual parable. Each episode is a Franciscan koan, a mystical riddle that does not ask to be solved, but to be lived. The celebrated opening sequence, with the friars returning from Rome in a torrential downpour, spinning in circles in the purest joy to decide where to go and preach, serves as a declaration of intent: this will not be a journey from point A to point B, but a circular and joyous exploration of faith. This is a cinema that breathes according to a liturgical, not narrative, rhythm, anticipating by decades the more contemplative drifts of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, whose lyrical and fragmented editing in The Tree of Life seems almost a hypertrophic echo of Rossellini's simplicity.

Visually, Rossellini performs a miracle of humility. His camera, which had stalked desperation through the streets of a martyred Rome, here makes itself a handmaiden to painting. The inspiration is not photographic realism, but the medieval fresco, particularly Giotto's cycle in the Upper Basilica of Assisi. Each shot is a small tableau, composed with a frontality and an almost didactic clarity. The characters move within a defined frame, their gestures essential, devoid of psychological trappings. Rossellini does not use the close-up to plumb the soul, as a Dreyer would in The Passion of Joan of Arc, but to register the face as a landscape of the spirit. And in this landscape, the most revolutionary choice of all occurs: having the friars played by actual monks from the monastery of Nocera Inferiore.

This is not a simple Neorealist device applied to a historical context. It is an ontological decision. Rossellini does not ask these men to "act" their faith; he asks them to "be" their faith before the camera. The result is staggering. There is not the slightest trace of artifice. The smile of Brother Juniper, the patience of Francis (played by Friar Nazario Gerardi), the perplexity before the tyrant Nicolaio are not products of the Actors Studio technique, but direct emanations of an existence devoted to the Gospel. In this sense, "The Flowers of St. Francis" is perhaps the purest "documentary on an idea" ever made. Rossellini does not document the life of a saint, but the living possibility of sainthood. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who considered this film an absolute masterpiece, learned his fundamental lesson for The Gospel According to St. Matthew right here: the sacred does not need to be interpreted, but only shown in its coarseness and its disarming truth, using faces taken from reality, faces that bear their own history inscribed upon them.

The film's beating heart resides in its original Italian title, which translates as "Francis, God's Jester". Francis is not just a "saint," a hieratic and inaccessible figure, but a "jester of God." He is a divine trickster, a holy fool whose logic subverts the conventions of the world. He is the Myshkin of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, a man whose radical goodness appears as idiocy in the eyes of society. This dimension of sacred comedy, almost a kind of spiritual slapstick, explodes in the episode of Brother Juniper who, to feed a sick confrere, cuts the trotter off a living pig, unleashing the owner's wrath. The resolution is not a sermon, but an act of humiliation so extreme and sincere that it transmutes rage into forgiveness. It is theology incarnated in a comic gesture, the Christian paradox staged with the lightness of an opera buffa. This fusion of the sublime and the grotesque, which Fellini would elevate to the stylistic signature of his entire career, finds its purest, most Franciscan root here.

Placed in its time, the film was an act of courage, profoundly out of step with its era. The Italy of 1950 was a divided nation, in the throes of the cultural Cold War between Christian Democratic influence and the intellectual hegemony of the Communist Party. For many leftist critics, Rossellini's work appeared as an escape into mysticism, a betrayal of Neorealism's social mission. They accused him of taking refuge in a comforting past, ignoring the workers' struggles and contradictions of the present. But this reading, however understandable, is myopic. In reality, "The Flowers of St. Francis" is a deeply political film, but on a metahistorical level. The poverty chosen by the friars, their community based on love and service, their radical opposition to the logic of possession and power, represented a critique as much of the nascent capitalist consumerism of the Western bloc as of the state atheism of the Soviet bloc. It was a spiritual "third way," an anarchic and Christian utopia that proposed, through evangelical simplicity, a revolution more profound than any political platform.

To rewatch it today is to undergo an experience of purifying one's gaze. Accustomed as we are to a cinema that is hyper-stimulating, narratively complex, and psychologically dense, Rossellini's simplicity can be initially disorienting. But if one agrees to slow down, to abandon narrative expectations and to enter the film's contemplative flow, one discovers a masterpiece of rare power. It is a cinema that does not want to explain, but to show. It does not want to convince, but to infect us with its joy. Like a fresco by Giotto, it does not age because its form is so essential as to become timeless. It is a small, quiet cinematic miracle, the proof that to touch the transcendent one needs no special effects or grand dramas, but merely a camera that looks with love and wonder upon the face of a man, and in that face, the entire, mad, and wonderful adventure of faith.