History, with
a capital H, was a melting pot for modern Italian comedy that, at the dawn of
the sixties, gradually detached itself from the slapstick and comedy of
manners. Works like The Great War (Mario Monicelli 1959), Everybody
Go Home (Luigi Comencini, 1960), or A Difficult Life (Dino Risi,
1961), have established a dialectical relationship between humor and historical
analysis.
Great success
of the year 74 We All Loved Each Other So Much, by Ettore Scola, stands
out as the pinnacle of this critical process. In this generational review, the
transalpine filmmaker and his shocking duo of screenwriters (the indispensable
Age and Scarpelli) question part of the social history of their country (from
the end of fascism to 1974), and this in the light of the 'History of cinema.
We know that
a film like Divorce Italian Style contributed as much to the acceptance of
divorce by the Italian population as the speeches of the political class. It is
therefore not surprising that as convinced and enlightened film buffs, Scola
and his writers summon the mythology of the seventh art to shed light on
Italian political and social changes.
Dedicated to
the memory of Vittorio De Sica, the film begins its reflective process with
images that refer to another great filmmaker of neo-realism. The inaugural flashback,
which looks back on the characters committed past, espouses the
quasi-documentary style of Rossellini's film Paisan. Each historical caesura is
also associated with a particular aesthetic regime and is manifested by
specific staging biases. Cinematographic references irrigate a scenario that
collides historical issues with purely cinematographic questions. For example,
the fact that Nicola's character is defending Bicycle Thieves at one point in
the story is not anecdotal. Scola recreates the tense post-war climate by using
De Sica's iconic film which, he says, crystallizes all the fears inherent in
this troubled period.
The so-called
economic miracle era, for its part, takes on the appearance of la Dolce Vita.
Scola going so far as to show the shooting of the Fellinian film by two of his
characters, with the kindness of the Maestro himself and Marcello Mastroianni,
who play their own roles. Scola then summons the figure of Antonioni, to
illustrate the bourgeois drift of one of his protagonists, embroiled in a
crisis of incommunicability with his family.
This close,
symbiotic relationship between fiction, History and History of cinema occurs at
multiple levels. The interpretation of the film also reflects the desire of the
authors to embed, in the very material of their work, an elaborate reflection
on the socio-cultural evolution of Italy. Aldo Fabrizi the bourgeois
entrepreneur who, in the film, belongs to a generation abhorred by Antonio, is
not only, in the cinema, the interpreter of Rome, Open City, but also
the sidekick of Toto, emblematic actor of the previous wave of Italian comedy.
Gassman and Manfredi personify the modernity of this genre. Sacred monsters as
much as sacred "monsters" (in the aptly named Viva l'Italia!
Or I See Naked) their physique more "one-size-fits-all",
"any" would say the purists, turns out to be less intrinsically
comical, freed from the clownish tics of Toto and Fabrizi.
But the
strength of We All Loved Each Other So Much lies in its ability to
sublimate what could have been but a tedious exercise in style, never
sacrificing emotion on the altar of critical analysis.
"We
wanted to change the world, it was he who changed us" we hear in this
work, both decidedly funny and eminently melancholy.
Elegie of
regret, Scola’s film confirms the defeats of a generation, while declaring its
love for popular art which has reflected the hopes of an entire nation. More
than thirty years after its production, the film remains one of the peaks of
this Italian comedy that we have loved so much, for its social significance as
much as for its humorous virtues.
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