The undisputed masterpiece of the Roman director continues to shine after all these years, offering the viewer new fantastic details. Verdone has not managed to reach such auteur heights again, partly inspired by The Big Chill (as declared), he has succeeded like never before in encapsulating all his human and existential obsessions in two hours.

An extremely ensemble film, with twenty characters, many well-crafted, grappling with the fearsome, fascinating, and pernicious invitation of the high school reunion, a universal judgment and a reckoning with a memorable soundtrack, all set in a villa with almost sulfurous undertones, ready for a night that will change their lives. The villa in the movie transforms into a true micro universe, an Exterminating Angel from which only one character seems immune, that Fabris immediately harassed by his peers for the mere crime of being different: he is the only one to have profoundly changed, not just in appearance, but in soul; the nostalgic school days are distant, and there remains only the embarrassment of an evening among strangers. Verdone immediately applies an evident symbolism in the annoying pine root at the entrance, which destroys all the unfortunate guests' oil pans, but not Fabris, the only one to avoid it effortlessly, because all it took was to look ahead. But the characters do not; they flee their essence and their sad situations by hiding in farce, jokes, and caricatures, impossible memories. And Verdone does not forget this aspect, staging Angelo Bernabucci and his genuine Roman spirit to set up the most amusing, now practically iconic moments and phrases that have gone down in history. But the director has other aims than those of the "cinepanettone" dictated by producer Mario Cecchi Gori, which probably also manifest in the choice of the Tuscan actors, Cenci and Benvenuti, who seem to be there more for comedic needs than anything else and who come across as forced. The actors wanted by Verdone (just follow any interview) conversely work magnificently, starting with the unsettling Vallanzani played by Ghini, a ruthless politician, a manipulator ready to voraciously exterminate and devour every innocence with the seductive card of power.

Verdone is so convinced of his cast that he fully enters the action only after half an hour, a bold choice that allows for familiarity with the many characters. And there's everything: from the sterile fake cynic, the perennial vixen, the infantile slacker joker, the former complex-ridden, the nouveau riche boor, and the frustrated psychologist. The director is relentless in describing for each the bitter aftertaste of life and his supreme obsession, that ideal time of existence, which is always behind us and which we vainly try to recover. There is no escape for anyone in this circle of hell, but Verdone has treatments that denote unusual cruelty precisely for the most genuine, who are annihilated for their purity: Fabris spontaneously decides to leave the massacre before the point of no return, the talkative Postiglione is drugged, while the innocent girl of the character played by Verdone himself is even raped. In the end, she is perhaps also the only one to have understood that circus of horrors, stating that "She does not want to become like them."

Participating in the reunion will also mean for the protagonist to irreparably ruin his own marriage, but in the very last scene, always enigmatic in pure Verdone style, the event seems to lead towards a new existential phase yet to be written, with the protagonist somehow found again after losing everything. "Compagni di Scuola" remains even today a splendid masterpiece, a milestone of Italian cinema barely weakened by its negligible flaws, an extraordinary bourgeois horror disguised as a comedy.

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