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Rating: We all know that life is difficult. However, sometimes certain films serve to remind us of this. This isn't exactly the intent of "A Difficult Life", but in part, perhaps, it is.
"A Difficult Life, like all Italian comedy films (of which, albeit in a very particular way, it is a part), is not a film about the future, but about the past and the present: or rather about a present overshadowed by the nearly fifteen-year disappointment of a generation that wanted to change the world and finds itself having to be careful not to be changed by the world instead" (Dino Risi).
Risi's words, the director of the film, project us, with quite a significant temporal leap, to the early 1960s, exactly in 1961. In the Italy of the boom and of ostentatious wealth as a symbol of redemption (social, but also moral), there were those who were forced to live their lives amid abuses and continuous blackmail. With this premise, Dino Risi, with the precious collaboration of Rodolfo Sonego in the screenplay phase, shoots "A Difficult Life", a splendid film featuring the best Alberto Sordi ever.
In narrating the events of Silvio Magnozzi (Sordi), Risi creates one of the best historical representations of post-war Italy: from the June 2 referendum to De Gasperi to Togliatti. Almost everything is in there: from the supposed liberation from dictatorship to the illusion of a healthy and robust democracy; from the cynicism of the common man to the awareness of values and ideals. There is a world inside, the world of Italy, captured with a technically detached eye (there is never pity or commiseration for any character), yet there is also so much passion, so much 'partisanship' and no hint of rhetoric.
A partisan during the war, and a journalist after, Magnozzi works at the editorial office of "Il Lavoratore," an independent left-wing proletarian newspaper. In his work, as in life, he attempts to maintain a certain political coherence. Honesty, especially intellectual honesty, does not pay: he ends up in jail, fails, and is even abandoned by his caring wife (a great Lea Massari, an actress who was unjustly underestimated for years). Once out of prison, he tries to publish a novel (title: "A Difficult Life"), but the only job he manages to beg for is as a secretary to an industrialist whom he had denounced years earlier for smuggling cash. However, when the employer decides to humiliate him in front of everyone, Magnozzi will have an unexpected reaction.
It may seem like a sort of revised and updated version of Chaplin's "Modern Times", and to be honest, the comparison wouldn't even be that far-fetched. Both films talk about work lost, found, and finally lost again, but above all, they discuss the dignity of the worker. Except that in "A Difficult Life", there are very few concessions to humor (Sordi makes you laugh very little, shedding any comic clichés and proving himself to be, in every way, a formidable multifaceted actor), and then there is political consistency as the general leitmotif: should one commodify their ideas to gain a bit of success, or should one persevere with their certainties even at the risk of a series of spectacular failures?
It's clearly a rhetorical question, but in the Italy of 1961, it wasn't just nothing. Thus, if "Il sorpasso" recounted the cultural change of Italy through the symbols and gestures typical of the boom (the mythical Aurelia, the night parties, the yacht, and the sea holidays), "A Difficult Life" doesn't try to achieve that effect through things or objects (except in some very rare moments), but through the psychology of the characters and the power of the images. Unforgettable are the rebellion scenes that Sordi flaunts against everything that makes wealth: memorable, when staggering and drunk, he spits on the luxury cars of some monarchists disappointed by the referendum result. And the final act of rebellion, when he throws the much-hated employer into the pool, is the most representative symbol of an ex-rebel tempted by conformity but unable to erase his revolutionary ideas. He doesn't want to change, while Italy is already doing so.
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