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The world of the province is most often a deadly spectacle, almost as if the life of man in open spaces, in natural expanses crossed by rare and damaged veins of tar, awakens in him the animalistic side, memories of the time when we were pigs. No, not monkeys, pigs. Mario Cioni (Roberto Benigni) wallows in the mud of Prato's suburbs, he spends his days in cinemas watching porn films along with his group of rough and vulgar friends, tries to hit on old ladies at senior dances, and lives at home with an overbearing mother who detests him. One thing gives him comfort: Berlinguer's scarecrow, from which the ideology for communism is born and the drive to attend the People's House, though he is incapable of participating in debates. Cioni, like his peers, is obsessed with sex, and the world around him is a theater of obscenity and vulgarity not for their own sake but as a consequence of the malaise of his people, the primitive and rural lower proletariat that doesn't know how to escape its condition except through mental digressions. Cioni is stuck, he has no god, he believes only in two things: pussy, and Berlinguer. And both remain distant illusions.
Debut as a director for the unlucky Bertolucci, who had the merit of launching in 1977 what would eventually become a national icon. Roberto Benigni here is light years away from the Los Angeles runways and elegant clothes, and you can notice what his true monster is: disorganized, inconclusive, illogical, sentimental. The character of Mario Cioni is a overwhelming, volcanic expression of material and spiritual poverty, he is someone who seems always to have everything go wrong: when he finally manages to invite an older woman to dance, his friends make him believe that his mother has died, when he loses at cards, he is forced to offer his friend Bozzone the favors of his mother who is still alive. In this first rough, red, and proletarian work, Bertolucci is guided by a Benigni who two years earlier had already brought the monologue "Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia" to the stage, making Mario Cioni the personification of the inability to communicate inner love, love for the mother, first described as suffocating but then mourned with one of the most overwhelming rants remembered (it might appear comical, but it’s of shocking drama), followed by a discouraging monologue on masturbation and the afterlife before the night spent sleeping under a bridge. Love for ideas, for that communism described by him as a wet dream, communism that like the first ejaculation shows you the way, and if followed, you just have to enjoy it. Love, perhaps, for a girl towards whom for the first time he does not feel a primitive sexual instinct but just wants to go to the sea with her, yet a spit will erase that only contact he had with her. All tied by an ideological thread linking politics, feminism, religion, the hope in the revolution as an escape from one's frustrations. And on this thread moves Mario Cioni, Roberto Benigni, spokesperson of that race put into rhyme by his friend Bozzone, a race that doesn't mind wanting to have sex with even their own mother:
"Noi semo quella razza che non sta troppo bene che di giorno salta i fossi e la sera le cene, lo posso gridà forte, fino a diventà fioco, noi semo quella razza che tromba tanto poco, noi semo quella razza che al cinema si intasa pe' vedè donne gnude, e farsi seghe a casa, eppure la natura ci insegna sia sui monti sia a valle, che si po' nasce bruchi pe' diventà farfalle, ecco noi semo quella razza che l'è fra le più strane, che bruchi semo nati e bruchi si rimane, quella razza semo noi è inutile fa' finta, c'ha trombato la miseria e semo rimasti incinta".
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