Marco Ferreri
Dillinger E' Morto (1969)

The end of the boom, the approaching of the '70s, the alienation of the individual are the main themes of this masterpiece by Ferreri, one of the highest titles in his filmography.

Following the ramblings of this engineer in a gas mask factory, the director narrates the disintegration of the middle-aged male, apparently integrated into the social context of the period of confirmed modernization of the country; a disintegration made of repressed and imaginary desires and a forgetting of self in favor of a comic book dream.

And he does it with a difficult, dangerous language: filming the story in (almost) real-time. And it is a success.

In short, the plot: an engineer (Michel Piccoli, immense) returns home after a day of work. In bed, the wife (Anita Pallenberg, the girlfriend of almost all the Stones) lies with a severe headache. The engineer rambles for about 80 minutes, among stoves and pots, the chatter of the little radio, which plays Dalla, Patti Pravo, The Four Kents. He finds a gun abandoned in a dresser, disassembles it, and starts to clean it. From the TV, the blah blah blah of interview tapes with students and a documentary about the American mob. We see the face of John Dillinger.

The housemaid arrives (Annie Girardot), returning from a dinner. The engineer joins her in the bedroom and sleeps with her, in front of the poster of the beloved singer Dino. He then continues his chores: he projects some Super 8 films, including one of his holidays in Spain with his wife and a couple of friends. He plays with the projected images, makes obscene gestures at the women in the film. Then, silhouetted, he points the gun in his mouth; he gives up committing suicide and paints the weapon red with white dots, à la Roy Lichtenstein…

I stop: even if interrupting the plot means castrating the review quite a bit.

The engineer of "Dillinger" is a paradigm of the alienated man forgetful of his emotions and full of induced desires; he aspires to be a Dillinger since the bandit embodies the figure of the criminal alone against everyone, master of his life. Something the protagonist never manages to be, lost between self-forgetfulness and immersed in dreams of novel adventures. The sense is that of sexual repression, but there is an overarching repression of the individual, who must occupy a place in the new society and conform to the standards of a country that believes it has finally found prosperity and security. A madman, a borderline who ultimately takes the leap into madness and vanishes into a Hollywoodian sunset, convinced of being free.

Madness as the last chance to escape a dehumanizing reality; sure, it's a small thing if compared to a life truly lived, even by criminals like the fabulous Dillinger. The engineer becomes infatuated in front of the Super 8 films, plays with the shadows distorted by the absence of the anamorphic lens. He deludes himself into thinking he can dispose of bodies that are two-dimensional, ghosts of a real that has already occurred and is deposited on celluloid. Transgression without risk. Hitchcock said that if a gun appears in a story, it must necessarily be used. It seems impossible in contemporaneity to avoid harming others in order to reclaim oneself; the media no longer give us any other chances.

The performances of the main actors are exceptional: Piccoli lends his face and mimicry for the portrayal of a tranquil madman, who performs his actions as if he were a six-year-old child. Annie Girardot is a non-beauty that is unsettling and capable of acting in half-tones, nuances, everyday routine. Pallenberg is just a presence but a necessary one. This beautiful wife abandoned on a bed is an object that is now unappealing for the engineer.

Ferreri was one of the best Italian directors of his time, capable, on the best occasions, of telling Italy's micro-changes, clues to macro-mutations and the price paid in terms of humanity and truth.

Even today, times are tough: but where are the directors?

yours, Giovanni Natoli, happy and pippo