Mario Monicelli
Romanzo Popolare

The '70s, with the backdrop of shabby housing projects in the Milanese suburbs. The metalworker Giulio Basletti, an unapologetic fifty-year-old bachelor, decides to start a family with the very young Vincenzina, a relative of friends who has just emigrated to the North from Montecagnano. An engaged unionist, perfectly at ease in the progressive climate of his years, Basletti never misses an opportunity to profess himself as modern and open-minded, in contrast with Vincenzina's relatives, who struggle to transfer the southern patriarchal family model to an industrialized Milan. His life is divided between the factory work, the stadium, and daily life with the beautiful Vincenzina, who reciprocates the passionate and tender love that Giulio has for her. Following a protest in which Giulio participates, the young and strapping Giovanni Pizzullo, a southern riot policeman injured in the clashes and played by the debutant Michele Placido, begins to frequent the Basletti household. Predictably, a fiery passion erupts between Giovanni and Vincenzina, despite her vain efforts to resist the persistent advances of the fervent officer. Encouraged by Giulio's understanding attitude, the young woman confesses the betrayal to her husband, genuinely determined to overcome the infatuation and resume her usual conjugal life. Yet, despite his efforts to be civil and "from the '70s," Giulio fails to contain his despair and jealousy, and after an anonymous letter, he feels entitled but more so obligated to publicly kick the adulteress out of the house. Tired of hearing the two rivals claim ownership rights over her, Vincenzina leaves them both to their male pride and their inability to understand her. We find the three characters after a few years: Giovanni, married to a young woman "faithful and obedient, as a true wife should be"; Giulio, living in melancholic solitude in his new life as a retiree, between the bocce club and card games, while Vincenzina, now a unionist in the factory where she is a department head, has learned not to let herself be chosen anymore but to take control of her own life and destiny, and to pay alone the price of an independence hitherto unknown.

Constructed through flashbacks and off-screen commentary by the protagonist, written by the director in collaboration with Age and Scarpelli, "Romanzo Popolare" is a bitingly ironic comedy, that grafts the social themes of those years (industrial proletariat, Southern immigration, women's emancipation) onto a melodramatic framework that guaranteed its vast public success. The film's strengths lie in the extraordinary performance of Ugo Tognazzi, perfect in the role of the worker who is progressive only in words, and in the presence of a splendid Ornella Muti, but above all in the linguistic research of the dialogues. Interesting is the mixture of dialects spoken in the Basletti housing project, which recreates the dimension of an extended southern courtyard family. Giulio's lines, in a tight Lombard jargon, mix a typically union-language with football metaphors and owe much to the contribution of Beppe Viola (who appears in the hilarious cinema scene as the "democratic and Christian" ticket seller) and Enzo Jannacci, uncredited authors of the Milanese dialect parts. Particularly effective is the representation of the bleak working-class suburb, where one can almost smell the morning coffee, the damp misty dawns before entering the factory, and the wallpaper in the overcrowded apartments of southern families. Those who were not yet born in those years can easily find in those houses and that factory the fragments of life recounted by those who lived through them. Equally well-chosen is the soundtrack: "Sono una donna non sono una santa" ironically comments on the love scene between Muti and Placido, but it is especially Jannacci's mournful "Vincenzina e la fabbrica" that makes the film's atmosphere vivid and poignant. A film that, despite various weaknesses and lapses in style, particularly in the portrayal of the protagonist's grotesque "fall from grace," has the undeniable charm of representing a snapshot of Italy in the '70s, with the same sociological precision with which "Il Sorpasso" described the previous decade. The rating would be 3.5, but its deeply personal emotional value raises it to a 4.