Carlo Verdone
Borotalco

"Borotalco" ('82) is, in my opinion, the most successful of Carlo Verdone's films: a work in which the Roman director abandons the caricatures of his early career and, having just passed thirty, returns a non-trivial image of early '80s Italy, and overall, a realistic reconstruction of the feelings of the youth of that era and a certain period later sometimes gratuitously called, the "retreat".

I don’t know with how much awareness, then, the film paints a non-trivial picture of the relationship between reality and fantasies, lightly but successfully describing the thwarted dreams of much of the petite bourgeoisie: allow me the literary comparison, but in this story, I see almost salgarian echoes, as I will explain further below.

Let's take a step back, however, by briefly examining the plot of the film.

After the great audience response to the first two episodic films, well produced by Sergio Leone (who, it is rumored, lent more than a hand in directing and editing to the young author), Verdone wanted to shoot his first themed film, describing the missed love between a young man who, to survive and in anticipation of marriage to the daughter of a small retail merchant, pretends to be a man of the world to win over a beautiful encyclopedia saleswoman, posing as Manuel Fantoni (in reality a small conman from the Roman underworld dealing with some legal troubles), enchanting her with adventures never experienced and boasting good connections in the show business world. This is followed by the usual unleashing of Plautine-like misunderstandings, until the conclusion, not as peaceful and serene as is sometimes read online or in some cinema dictionaries.

From a strictly technical point of view, "Borotalco" does not excel in terms of direction, although it denotes, on Verdone's part, a careful choice of locations and a non-sketchy description of Rome, favoring a disenchanted look at the sunny outskirts of the Capital; the performances, however, are excellent, both of the two protagonists (Eleonora Giorgi, in particular, is by far the best brilliant actress of the last thirty years of Italian cinema), and mainly, of the character actors used by the director: I allude to the late Mario Brega in the role of the almost crude father-in-law of the protagonist, and Angelo Infanti in the role of the "great son of a bitch" Manuel Fantoni, a Gassmann-like conman in The Easy Life, in a minor key. Also noteworthy is a cameo by pre-hard Moana Pozzi and pre-holiday comedy Christian de Sica.

Regarding the significance of the film, I would like to say a few more words.

Verdone's and Giorgi's characters essentially live two parallel lives: frustrated by the everyday, they react with an escape to a world that is not theirs and does not correspond to the real one.

One fully embraces the persona of Manuel Fantoni, boasting the exoticism of the cargo flying the Liberian flag (a symbol of escape that truly echoes, in a minor way, Salgari's India on the Po of the suicide victim); the other dreams of a meeting with her idol Lucio Dalla, perhaps to enter the world of singing, an elsewhere that many young people dreamed of, and still dream of, changing their idols of the time. Towards the end of the film, all dreams collapse, as Fantoni's mask falls, and simultaneously the myth of Lucio Dalla fades, the exotic myth vanishes, as does the entertainment one.

What remains is a forced return to petit bourgeois life, to the unwanted marriage, the interruption of the desired sentimental relationship, which, in the non-accommodating finale of the film, is re-proposed in the fleetingness of betrayal, in the normality and, if you will, the baseness of human relations.

In the end, none of the film's characters has the courage to break out of their shell, to have that stroke of wings aimed at redeeming a flat life: dreams die at dawn and the cargo remains anchored in its port, or sails only in fantasy.

I don’t know about you, but all this makes me melancholy.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (H.D. Thoreau)