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Rating: Released in '83, "Acqua e sapone" forms an ideal diptych with the previous "Borotalco" ('82), describing in a light-hearted way, yet not lacking in depth, the difficulties of love relationships and the frustrations of the petty bourgeois, provincial life of the inhabitants of the largest provincial city in our country... Rome.
A young man struggling with perennial job problems (Verdone himself) improvises as a private tutor for a young Italian-American model (Natasha Hovey), disguising himself as a priest. His charade is soon discovered by the girl who, however, falls in love with the man and gets involved in his life and habits, which are ultimately simple and genuine, to escape the glamorous world of fashion. However, an overly career-focused mother (Florinda Bolkan), and the young woman's own fickleness, will make the feeling fade away, leading to a desire for a return to normality and the consequent social divisions and differing visions of life.
Even from the brief synopsis of the plot, it's easy to perceive, in my opinion, the maturation of Verdone's cinematic language, who, towards the mid-'80s, was seeking an authorial way out of his early sketches, using his transformative abilities and the same skill in crafting good mechanisms of comedy-of-errors for a more mature analysis of interpersonal relationships, conducted without a didactic approach, or truths to impart, inheriting the disenchanted view of certain neorealism.
Neorealism that, similar to "Borotalco", shines in this film both through the characterization of the characters and the affectionate depiction of the protagonist's petty bourgeois life (thanks to the beautiful characterizations by sora Lella Fabrizi and newcomer Fabrizio Bracconieri), as well as through the consolidated choice of "non-places" where the story develops, free from unnecessary rhetoric and delivered in their normality (from the interiors of the protagonist's house, to bars, restaurants, and exteriors).
At the same time, it is a youthful work by Verdone that, in some aspects, suffers from naivety and excessive superficiality in the plot development: too pronounced, and even sketch-like, is the characterization of the fashion world, in some respects gratuitously invoked for the story the Roman director is staging (the gap between the two protagonists would have emerged, in addition to age, also from the characterization of the girl as any upper-class Roman), excessively hasty resolution of the affair, with the story development itself somewhat unraveled.
At the same time, it is a work that is poetic in some respects, especially in the film's final part, where the protagonist perceives the inadequacy of his relationship with the young girl, the objective difficulty of overcoming generational and social divides that transcend the love of the "here and now", and in the touching scene during the closing credits, where the protagonist, along with his friends, lays in a wheat field near the airport, first watching the departing planes (and loves), then moving to a liberating thing as the notes of a prominent song from the film play on the car radio - symbolizing the aspiring tutor who returns to the goliardic and unresolved post-adolescent idleness.
Beautiful, finally, is the soundtrack by Stadio and Vasco Rossi, and interesting is the performance of the sixteen-year-old Hovey, with a Verdone always in the spotlight. Cameo by Christian De Sica for a film that, in any case, should be remembered and appreciated by both Carlo's fans and lovers of Italian cinema.
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