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A Special Day (1977) is a film by Ettore Scola.
Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni)
Antonietta (Sophia Loren)
The special day is May 6, 1938, the day when Adolf Hitler, visiting Italy, arrived on his last day in Rome and met Benito Mussolini and the King to forge an alliance.
The film opens precisely with a documentary made of archive footage from that day. The train with Hitler arrives in Rome, having departed from the Brenner Pass and crossed the entire country.
The reception in Rome is triumphant, the Italian army is lined up along the Imperial Forums, with alpini, bersaglieri, infantry, tanks, airplanes, truly impressive.
A few minutes of black-and-white history, and then, with a cut, we transition from the documentary to the film, and even in the film, we find ourselves early in the morning, in Rome, on the same special day: May 6, 1938.
A long single take, one of the longest in the history of Italian cinema, shows a popular housing complex, scanning upwards, pausing for brief moments on scenes of daily life. The tenants, just awakened, are getting ready for the big day. The camera travels further up and gently enters the home of Antonietta, a woman in her mid-40s. Antonietta has prepared the coffee and has clothes on her arm that she is about to distribute to her husband and her six children (and if they have a seventh, they'll receive a prize). Antonietta's family is the model fascist family, loyal to the regime. The husband is almost a parody of the good fascist, who to be a "man" must necessarily be a Husband, Father, and Soldier. So reads one of the many captions in the photo album Antonietta keeps. Newspaper clippings, aphorisms of the duce. Antonietta is also a model mother-wife-fascist, but she is not happy. With her husband, there is no conversation, love, tenderness, and raising six children is no joke, a life of sacrifices for the family and the fatherland. Outside of her role as a mother and wife, Antonietta practically doesn't exist for anyone.
Enough with the chit-chat, she prepares the children, washes, dresses, makes breakfast, and stays at home. Everyone will go to the Forums, but not you, Antonietta, you can't afford it. You have to tidy the house, make the beds, collect the laundry, clean, prepare food.
That's how it is. Everyone has left, and you don't even know where to start. Then it happens that the pet Indian mynah bird escapes from its open cage; the window is open. The bird lands on the ledge of the opposite window. Antonietta is determined to retrieve the bird at all costs; it too is part of the family.
She rings the bell of the house with that window. Gabriele lives there, writing letters, working, and there is a gun on the desk, perhaps Gabriele is contemplating ending it all.
It takes little to meet, just follow an escaped Indian mynah from the balcony, dare a bit higher on the terrace among the sheets drying in the sun, to illuminate a faded sky with new colors (Sophia Loren from the book: “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow”).
Fate, chance, or whoever makes two lonely and unhappy souls meet. Gabriele too is in distress, he was a radio announcer at Eiar but was fired for being considered anti-fascist, subversive, and especially "depraved." But now there's a bird to recover, maybe there's time for a coffee, even for a few steps of rumba.
Ettore Scola directs one of his most successful films. He wins the gamble of proposing the most beautiful couple of Italian cinema (Loren and Mastroianni), now advanced in age and in uncomfortable roles; those of the defeated, the marginalized, the rejected.
For the first time in Italian cinema, the theme of homosexuality is tackled from another perspective, more human and profound than the cliché of the sympathetic but often hysterical, yet always one-dimensional caricature.
For the regime, Gabriele is "depraved." Gabriele is a fag, and he himself will shout it in the stairwell, for everyone to hear, even that gossipy concierge who already knew it all. But Gabriele is first and foremost a person. He is of good nature, cultured, kind, an attractive man, and Antonietta (who knows nothing of his homosexuality) falls for him in minutes.
An impossible love story only that this time it's not love (which governs all) but human relationships, the recognition of the role of a human being who, before being a fag or a kind of broodmare producing children for the fatherland, is a person perhaps even worthy of esteem and consideration.
This is what Antonietta will learn during her special day; Gabriele already knew these things and was about to end it all precisely for this reason. It will be Gabriele who will tell Antonietta something like: "Of this special day with you, Antonietta, I will not remember so much the sex (for me, nothing changes, I remain a homosexual) but I will remember you, the coffee, the rumba, the laughs, your company." Perhaps this is where Antonietta realizes she "exists," albeit potentially, as a human being, and not just in the role society (fascist) has assigned her.
We always end up conforming to others' mentality, even when they are wrong.
A delicate, poetic, touching, moving film with two extraordinary performers and first-rate direction. The shots from above or below the large circular housing complex with the courtyard in the center, the so-called Federici buildings on Viale XXI Aprile, the largest public housing building constructed in Italy in the thirties. The tracking shots in Gabriele's house, now Antonietta’s, her spying on Gabriele through the window. A solid, structured, intimate direction, perfectly integrated with the two truly magnificent protagonists, and if Ettore had no doubts about Marcello, he had many about Sophia, who had never in her life (an icon of overwhelming beauty) played such a subdued role, an unmade-up housewife wearing an anonymous floral dressing gown for the entire film (by the way, the dressing gown will be auctioned). Loren took time to immerse herself in the character, but the results were exceptional.
One of the last masterpieces of Italian cinema, a roar from the past against the plastic popcorn eighties that were about to arrive.
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