Mario Monicelli
Amici miei

Created in 1975 by Mario Monicelli, who took over from the original director Pietro Germi due to the latter's passing, "Amici Miei" is perhaps the last act of Italian comedy and the unconscious epitaph, I would almost say the funeral, of an era, beyond the full effectiveness of a product that, like few others, makes the viewer laugh, creating catchphrases not without a bitter aftertaste.

The story should be known to all debaser readers, although I've noticed that among the younger generations (let's say those born in the '90s) the film is almost unknown, despite numerous and constant TV airings: so I'll summarize it, albeit extremely briefly, also because, in the film, more than a story, "situations" are described.

Five middle-aged Tuscan friends exorcize the approaching old age, the sorrows of family life, and their human miseries by organizing pranks (zingarate) to the detriment of anyone who crosses their path, especially if silly or defenseless: they enter a village pretending to be technicians ready to build a new highway on site - with associated expropriation of the villagers' homes -, go to the station slapping passengers of a departing train, get admitted to a clinic mocking nuns and nurses, and pretend to be part of the mafia linked to the Marseilles clan.

The five, real contemporary Italian archetypes (not just from yesterday, but also today, I would say), are the journalist and narrator Perozzi, generally unfaithful and with a family life that is at least disastrous, not without melancholic traits; Count Mascetti, a fallen nobleman, lover of gambling and beautiful women, also with a disastrous family life akin to Perozzi's, but a sort of "noble" alter ego; the bachelor architect Melandri, cultured and ethereal, lover of art and also a scion of an excellent Florentine family; the bartender Necchi, of popular origin, owner of the place where the five often play billiards and plan their pranks, married partly for convenience and partly for love, but with a relatively serene family life (except for lubricious temptations); lastly, Doctor Sassaroli, a clinical/cynical owner of a private nursing home in the Florentine hills, who initially joins the four occasionally, then increasingly stably, due to his affinities with the others and his diabolical sarcasm.

There are many ways to interpret and evaluate this film, many of which are well known and widespread online: the joke as a reaction to death, both the feared and the one actually present in everyone’s lives, as a reaction to the mediocrity of existences, as a burst of genius compared to the uniformity of daily life, as an anomaly compared to the expected. The whole, if you look closely, with tones from the Decameron, where a Florence besieged by plague is the excuse to tell stories, sometimes with a sensual background, sometimes with a parodic one, in parallel with the somewhat pestilential air that blew in Italy during the oil crisis, terrorism, between the revolutionary '68 and the years of the reflux.

Leaving aside the speculative connotations it may give rise to, in its classicism, this film, I find it appropriate to make some concluding remarks on the staging and the quality of the cast, which make "Amici Miei" a small, perhaps even underrated, masterpiece of Italian cinema: Monicelli’s direction is dry and essential, yet capable of bringing us back to an atmosphere now forgotten, like that of suburban bars, old-style billiard rooms, as well as an unconventional and non-sketchy - often nocturnal - image of Florence in the '70s, much like the bleak family interior atmospheres, squalid despite their closeness with the eternal beauty of the surrounding art, and perhaps drowning in it. Excellent and well-characterized performances from actors as they no longer make them (Moschin, Del Prete, Celi, even Blier), the challenge between the French school of Noiret and the Italian one of Tognazzi - mainstays of the film - is so real that it makes their characters seem alive, real, and existent to us.

Scathing and vivid, the subject and the screenplay, in mixing melancholy, comedy, outrage, solitude into a whole that, at once, entertains and makes one reflect, still results as a classic today, a refuge compared to much less attractive contemporary cinema, but also compared to other films of the era, with more intellectual pretensions, like the almost contemporaneous "La grande abbuffata" by Ferreri.

Chapeau.