Dino Risi
Il Sorpasso

45 years and not showing it at all. Dino Risi's most famous film continues to be rightly ranked among the most significant and influential works in the history of our cinema. It is conventionally credited with having represented the most remarkable portrayal of Italy during the economic boom, where the usual bourgeois and bigoted theater is transfigured by the mirages of opulence, projecting it far beyond the stereotypes of the Italian comedy.

The story is about the Roman rogue Bruno, a failed forty-year-old driving a Lancia Aurelia, and the initiatory journey he takes the shy student Roberto on. A social apprenticeship lasting just twenty-four hours, unfolding through the simulacra of pleasure-seeking and crazed Italy in the early '60s (the gold rush on vacation roads, parties and yachts, but also grimmer slices of life, like the port of Civitavecchia). The relationship between the two characters, masterfully played by Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, in their endemic opposition, in the tormented and ambiguous fascination Roberto feels for Bruno, is certainly the focal narrative pivot. Roberto sees in the picaresque Bruno, unsuccessful both in affections and professional activities but a skilled snake charmer, not only the means to enter that adult community from which he may have always felt excluded but probably also a Charon to help him reach his dark side, until then repressed. An adventure lived at a heart-pounding pace, which explores unknown shores in the hearts of the protagonists, only to inevitably crash into a cliff on the coastal road. Even their first encounter evokes gloomy omens, in the muggy and surreal Rome of Ferragosto.
Everything works perfectly in "Il Sorpasso."

The screenplay is sumptuous and articulated, rightly conveying the depth of the characters (Roberto's intense introspective mind contrasted with Bruno's boastful and pressing remarks), the cinematography by Alfio Contini is spectacularly refined, and Risi's directorial touch masterfully stitches it all together, with the particular aid of innovative cuts and long takes.
But the main legacy of the film certainly goes beyond the remarkable status of archetype of road movies (just consider its influence on "Easy Rider"). "Il Sorpasso," with its idea of speed as morality and paradigm, inaugurates a dizzying concept of modernity: our vision of reality - that which in the same years economist Galbraith defines as "The Affluent Society" - can now only be that of individuals viewing the world from a spider hurtling at breakneck speed. And cinema adapts. The frenzy of a film that accelerates spatiotemporal coordinates is an art that starts to become fundamental because it influences the developments of contemporary man, his way of thinking.

In this sense, Risi anticipates by a few years one of the core theories of Marshall McLuhan's monumental essay "The Global Village" - cinema as an extension of our nervous system - and indeed stands as a fundamental precursor, as well as an undeniable master.