1962, Italy
Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica
7 // 10
If you have a four-course meal, do you rate the dinner or the dishes? Is acting really what we should remember young Sophia Loren for? What are the chances of milk adverts driving men insane? There's only one way to find out!
The first thing to know about the Boccaccio '70 is the blatant lie in the title. And it's kinda important to know about it, because when I started to watch the film, immediately I did feel a confusing clash between what I was seeing and what I was expecting to see. The film actually dates back to 1962 and placing it in the right decade in your head does make a great deal of a difference in the reception, since some themes throughout evidently pre-date the cultural (and sexual) revolution of the 60s.
The second thing to keep in mind about the Boccaccio '70 is that this is not a film. It's a collection of four films (each just short of an hour's length), which are completely individual in plot and characters, although they do share the themes of love, passion and modern times to some extent. It's those themes that inspired the whole undertaking and earned it the title that holds a reference to the Boccaccio's Decameron.
Obviously, coming from four very different directors those four pieces share very little outside the general themes I mentioned. Also, rather surprisingly, considering the calibre of the directors involved, they do seem to differ in quality quite a lot. The first two are the centrepiece (Monicelli's Renzo e Luciana and Fellini's Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio) while the other two (Il lavoro by Visconti and La riffa by De Sica) by comparison are almost negligible.
Especially Visconti's piece which is downright boring, over-scripted and, dare I say, badly acted. There's a bit of the Italian manière to be blamed here, no question about it (especially in the acting department) but the excuses can only stretch so far. Otherwise, Il lavoro, the uninspiring tale of an adultery of a dandy completely backfires. It does very little, despite its premise, to actually question or challenge the traditional (Italian or not) patriarchal society, and even though it seems to steer at one point towards giving the main female character (Romy Schneider) the modern freedom of sex-liberation, it does end with a bitter turnaround where a woman remains a victim and a loosing side either way, while her alpha-male husband gets away with it hardly chastised. It is by far the weakest of the four and should be watched as first, so it could quickly be forgotten.
La riffa fares better, with much more interesting characters and a story that deals with problems that many more people could understand and identify themselves with (as opposed to a hooker hooked profligate aristocrat from Il lavoro). The themes represent a good balance between the problem of poverty and desperation and liberating power of love and dreams. It's serious but not depressing while being funny but not too frivolous. Again though, it does very little to challenge the status quo it depicts. The 'salvation' comes from the most obvious direction and offers more of a patching up than healing. Still, it's enjoyable enough to watch and it does give an interesting insight into some aspects of every day doings and character types of that past reality. Whether the Zoe's (Sophia Loren) 'ordeal' had any anchoring in the reality of that time is another issue, but at least it doesn't seem unthinkable.
With Fellini's Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio however, it's a complete change in tone and quality. This is pure Fellini. Surreal, oneiric, Freudian, obsessive, satirical and funny. There's more directorial and artistic quality here squeezed into 50 minutes worth of celluloid reel, than some Hollywood directors could muster throughout their entire, lifelong careers. Le tentazioni... also follows the brief brilliantly. The way it punctuates the hypocrisy of the traditional moralists is beyond reproach and could, without any tinkering, be applied today just as well as back then, in 1962. It shows, somehow painfully, that the slogans on the banners of the (predominantly of the Catholic background) crusaders against the moral impurity have not changed all that much in the last fifty years. It's easy to imagine, that they also stem from exactly the same complexes and frustrations as they always have been. And while the realisation is bitter, Fellini still manages to deliver it in a witty and provocative manner, which is an absolute delight to watch. It must have also been quite a fun to make. Some of the props (giant model of Anita Ekberg's cleavage stands out as a good example) must have made the crew on set chuckle. There's simple and honest silliness there, but it does not descend into triviality and it's still serving a very tightly directed purpose. The film is a masterpiece in every way and in itself scores 10/10 effortlessly.
The last film I mention is actually the first on the DVD release while it was cut out from the cinema version altogether. Renzo e Luciana is by far the most surprising and most interesting of the four. As the only one does not feature a glorified Hollywood female sex symbol (which apparently was the reason behind not including it in the cinema cut of Boccaccio '70) and as the only of the four films pretty much completely does away with any notion of sexuality or eroticism. What it provides us with though, is an incredibly sensitive, subtle and intelligent insight into a social changes accompanying the clash of rapidly changing modern world with its lifestyle, and the world of traditional values with its social foundations such as the very fabric of the family. Being in quite stark contrast with the expressive, sometimes even bombastic style of the other three films, it follows a simple enough and humble story of a young couple in love, who are trying to be happy in a world that is too busy modernising itself to waste time for things as trivial as love. That simple, short film gave me a better social commentary on the changes that Italian society underwent in the early sixties, than even a university lecture could provide. It is also a great snapshot of Monicelli's sensitivity as a director which results in the most insightful, probably most meaningful of those four films.
There is one more thing that sets Monicelli's and Fellini's pieces from the other two. It's the setting. Our vision of Italy through cinema is mostly shaped by the Hollywood tributes in much the same way as, say, Woody Allen romanticises the common perception of Paris. We all know what the old-timey Italy looked like. It had Gregory Peck on vespa zigzagging among the traffic of Rome, of course! But both Monicelli and Fellini show us a very different picture of Italy. It's an image of a country that becomes a rapidly industrialised and urbanised building site, where two millennia old Roman ruins disappear behind the rows of modern homogenic and soulless blocks of flats. And where kids play next to diggers and romantic lovers only see each other in the brief moments between the shifts they work in order to be able to afford another modern kitchen appliance. It's actually a bit funny to think that the conclusion of Renzo e Luciana, even if not explicitly pessimistic itself, still feels like a grim parody of Ladyhawke (if you, of course, ignore the fact, that Monicelli's work pre-dates Richard Donner's by 23 years). Also, both Monicelli and Fellini, present themselves through their instalments as perspicacious observers and able commentators, an impression I did not get (or at least not to that extent) from Visconti's and De Sica's films. It doesn't make them not worth watching, of course, and I am far from discouraging anyone from seeing the whole of the film. But I would do suggest, however, reshuffling the order to leave the best bits for later.
Gelato dopo la pasta, ragazzi e ragazze, gelato dopo la pasta.
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