Ettore Scola
Brutti, sporchi e cattivi

LA RECENSIONE

I would like to highlight this film from 1976, directed by Ettore Scola and awarded the Best Director prize at the 29th Cannes Film Festival.

Set in the Roman suburbs of the seventies as Wiki says, it offers a ruthless glimpse into the life of a family (?) aiming to break the record for overcrowding within four walls (?). A series of characters easily mistaken for members of the Addams family share a mute sentence, brawling and reproducing, united by an alleged fatherhood in the guise of Giacinto, the family patriarch played by Nino Manfredi.

Now, it may be because I have great admiration for Manfredi, but it’s hard to deny that in this film as in others he managed to imbue his character with uncommon humanity and intensity (and to think I met him in the elevator of "Department Store"...)

The camera lens almost delicately rests on a reality unable to reciprocate the courtesy, rotten and putrid and yet so authentic it gets under your skin. The many exaggerations fail to diminish the brutality that the film exudes, in every gesture, in every word. The insistence on the details, the claustrophobic settings, an indifference and a degradation that are cultivated from childhood, consistently daily, and without redemption.

The smells are real, the colors absent. You finish the film and feel the need to take a shower.

There is little to save in the humanity described by Scola, to be drowned like rats in a bottomless latrine.

Well, if this was (or is) also Italy, then it's just as well that there are no more directors and performers capable of shoving reality under our noses.