Desire (Italian: Desiderio) is a 1946 Italian melodrama film directed by Marcello Pagliero and Roberto Rossellini and starring Massimo Girotti, Elli Parvo and Carlo Ninchi.
Contents
Plot
Paola, daughter of a railwayman, leaves her home in Abruzzo to go to Rome, where she finds work with a dressmaker. It does not last, and she drifts into high-end prostitution. Shocked one morning by seeing the corpse of a girl who had thrown herself from a building, she is comforted by Giovanni, a kindly older man whose business is breeding flowers. Contrasting the mess of her own life with the simple purity of his, she resolves to return to the family home and see her sister Anna, whose wedding she failed to attend. Giovanni will follow later and ask her father for her hand.
While Anna is glad to see her and her mother accepts her back, her father refuses to acknowledge her existence and Nando, her sister's husband, regards her as fair game. She is also pestered by Riccardo, now married, who had seduced her. Worried over her husband's infatuation with Paola, Anna persuades him to take her away for a few days. Riccardo then learns from the girl in the village post office that Giovanni is coming to claim Paola, so he threatens to reveal her past if she does not succumb again. Learning this from Anna, Nando rushes back to the village and, after knocking Riccardo out, claims from Paola his reward for saving her. Once he has finished, Paola throws herself from a railway bridge. Walking from the station to the family home, Giovanni is shocked to see policemen guarding a corpse under a blanket.