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Rating: Hello everyone and welcome back to our beloved cinema section after a period of absence! I'm leaving you this last review, before my departure for Sharm El Sheik, almost as if it were a Christmas gift, which I obviously wish you to spend peacefully in front of a Christmas tree with monochrome red or blue balls (in the North), a nativity scene (in the center-south and islands), and at every latitude equipped with sparkling wine bought at the supermarket or red wine strictly gifted to you by clients, colleagues, your or your associates' commercial partners, plastic glasses and plates (better with a name or identification number), all kinds of dried fruits, slices of pandoro, panettone (glazed or not), nougat and/or almond bars, and anything else you need. And obviously firecrackers: like raudi, magnum, zeus, and I can't remember what else.
That said, my gift to You (let's leave the "with You" alone, for once).
I would suggest sticking to a "Christmas classic," where by "classic" I mean something so familiar that it never ages, something so present in our lives and traditions that it makes us forget the passage of time, the time since it was created, and at the same time, it is future-oriented, saying what we are and what, without wanting it, we might become if we have enough time and life, just by being part of a human race in which, as my original commenter Jake Chambers well says, we all believe we are different, remaining in the end the same as others in this.
And what makes us more equal, "classics" in our own way and without authentic will, than the desire for a Christmas vacation, along with many people the same yet different from us by origin, social extraction, culture, and whatever else, all united by the mere fact of being somewhere warm (like Christmas on the Nile or in Rio) or, as happens in this progenitor, prototype of 80s comedy, under the snow? I would say nothing makes us more equal than this, the desire to escape only to find ourselves in a new prison along with many escapees, as happens in the notorious Christmas vacations.
The film I comment on here ('83), a work not without moral from our beloved Vanzina brothers, certainly represents one of the most admirable creations of our "minor" cinema, thanks to its beautiful array of characters and the sentimental and non-sentimental minuets that characterize the various stories told, whose Leitmotiv, and Worldview, seem more or less always the same to me: a background noise that behind sequins, glitter, the abundance of a "drinking Cortina," the small southern bourgeois' desire for redemption whose ambition is to be newly rich among the rich of the North, always seem the same to me, that is, the boredom of living, the inadequacy compared to what one is but others ask us to be every day, the inability to enjoy the achievements reached if not as a measure of goals to be reached, like a milestone of the seemingly endless road that one believes must be traveled. Almost the antithesis of what represents both in Nordic mythology and in Latin Christian doctrine, Christmas, that is, the day of the rebirth of Sol Invictus, the new beginning.
You certainly laugh and joke in this film, along with the rising stars of the time Calà and De Sica, or with the invaluable Mario Brega as the father of the "not yet Cesaroni" Claudio Amendola, but it always returns, with a touch of bitterness barely tempered by fun and the fake lights of the high Belluno nightclubs, the hotel halls, the warm woodiness of the rooms, and the blinding white snow, that desire to be someone else and in another place, despite the holiday and the escape that accompanies it.
This dimension of otherness, in summary, could be interpreted, from the perspective assumed by the Vanzina (of course according to my humble opinion), in the only possible sense of a secular Christmas, deprived of the religious connotations that accompany it and their reassuring certainties, giving us back the only ethical meaning, though treacherous and ultimately hopeless, of this holiday. Which doesn't seem far-fetched to me, remembering the secular liberal education of the children of the great Steno.
Consider, for everyone, the episode of Christian De Sica who, in this film, plays the part of the "crypto/non-crypto" gay until the final agnitio of the parents, and the masterful nature of the scene in which, confessing his (presumed) "diversity," he is almost on the edge between self-acceptance - and above all the need to be accepted together with his Venetian lover - and the necessity to return to the ranks, to bourgeois certainties and pre-established roles that would characterize him: in this, the desire for otherness borders on drama and betrayal, with no real Christmas probably existing, leaving the individual alone with his inner conflicts.
Or again, consider the masterful pirouettes of Calà and Stefania Sandrelli (I open a parenthesis: she was never as beautiful as in the magical year '83, see also "La chiave"), their sentimental comings and goings which, represent, themselves, the otherness and ambiguity of relationships, where the uncomfortable role of a lover or the cheerful role of the suitor are nothing but the carnival masks of unknowable faces - and here the dull Calà serves as an ideal "type" of the individual of his time, who has demolished family foundations in the name of sentimental and emotional self-sufficiency that carries the germ of latent suicide - behind which lies nothing, or the vague, the ephemeral, from the Cortina mountains to the "falsely cheerful" Maracaibo we hear at the end of the film, full of exotic promises that are, in brilliant synthesis, unfulfilled promises of escape from oneself.
I wouldn't want to tell you more about the film, which you certainly know, and, after reading this review, I hope you will want to know and see on one of these cold and/or damp and/or depressing evenings that usually characterize the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve and, hence, the first days of the year post-feasting and pre-return to work.
Rather, I would like to use these few remaining lines to remember the actors from this film who are no longer with us, above all Guido Nicheli and Mario Brega, with a thought for the fun and kindness they involuntarily gave to me and the many others across Italy who appreciate them, even without knowing them, and two users of the site, known to you all, who have bid us farewell this year, leaving us with what they wrote, and, at least, the possibility of remembering them, making them alive every day as we approach their texts, which are also testaments of affection and love for music, cinema, art in general, and all the people who pass by, even fleetingly.
Textually Yours,
Il_Paolo
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