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Rating: "Vincè, I'm gonna kill myself. As they say, better 1 day as a lion than 100 days as a sheep, right? Eh, what's it to me, Tonì, the lion, the sheep, do 50 days as a teddy bear and no one talks about it anymore".
This is Massimo Troisi.
I was in the army when they announced his death. That same year, Senna also died, a flood devastated Piedmont, and Italy, betrayed by Baggio, lost the world championships on penalties. Annus horribilis 1994. Not to mention the first elections won by Berlusconi. I consoled myself by making love with a poll worker I was guarding in Verona. It wasn't entirely easy yet to foresee what would happen in Italy with that guy's entry into politics; now everything is much clearer, but by now the left has finally found its worthy adversary, the maggggic Wa(l)ter. A flush.
Anyway, let's go back to Massimo and this little film which, unlike the previous one, "Ricomincio da tre", begins, takes place, and ends in Naples, with Neapolitan co-stars, still Lello Arena in the role of inconsolable Tonino, left by his girlfriend for a Swede ("she wanted to tell me, you leave me too alone, I don't even have a dog to talk to" / "Tonì, if she wanted a dog, she would've gotten a dog, the choice was precise, the Swede!') and the beautiful Giuliana De Sio, met at a funeral at home and who gets engaged to Massimo/Vincenzo only to leave him just when Tonino finds his beloved again. A story like many others, of a Vincenzo who doesn't quite know what he is in life or what he wants to do with his life (for sure he doesn't work), a sister who, with her husband and daughter in tow, lives at home with him and the mother, the cumbersome presence/absence of a famous actor brother ("how could Alfredo become a comic actor, with that tragic face&'), an old math professor who lives upstairs for whom the mother cooks and mends socks, which Vincenzo has the thankless task of delivering ("uh, he never calls Alfredo though").
A little story in which the central thread is the troubled friendship between the two, intertwined with a love relationship, short but equally troubled, with De Sio. Here’s a first key to understanding Troisi's construction of the character Vincenzo, a guy who lets himself live and everything slides off him, only asking that things steer clear of him, Tonino’s problems, De Sio’s requests for tenderness (the scene after sex is Oscar-worthy, with him turning on the radio and the romantic phrase "maro?!!! Napoli's losing to Cesena, after all the money that’s been spent building the team?"), the mother’s concerns for the professor, the professor’s testamentary concerns with his sisters over the house inheritance, his sister’s interference in his love life (stop wasting time writing serenades). The more he seeks shade, the more everyone goes to draw him out, making his life unbearable with their small, petty issues. In the soap-opera-like succession of these embarrassingly ordinary episodes/personal relationships, Troisi weaves and builds the extraordinariness of his comedy, full of ramshackle theories (like peasants fleeing the countryside due to holes in their pockets through which they lost money), cynical jokes (about Tonino wanting to kill himself, "tell him that if he wants to stab himself, to do it on the right side because his liver is all bruised on the left"), wordplay, hyperboles, deconstruction of clichés, and above all a slew of brilliantly funny gags perfectly woven into the story.
The film is peppered with these moments, all 'taken' from the street, family and personal contexts, and from the observation and amplification of the tiniest gestures and behaviors of people who frequented or had frequented his (real) life. The life that is in the film but he doesn't narrate, only leaving hints for the viewer to catch. It’s easy then to imagine Troisi in elementary school, frustrated by the conscientious student Balocco, who came second in the class ahead of him only because he was favored by the teacher and 'recommended' ("the teacher always asked him about the Japanese and he would reply: the Japanese are small but of sharp intelligence"), and evolved into a sophisticated version of the Robertino wrecked by the mother in "Ricomincio da tre", a paradigm of comedy born and made 'from below', by someone who chose to always see life from the last rows. And for this, a pitiless demystifier of everything that must be done quickly and within set times to reach the front rows.
Sorry for the delay (and the imprecise quotes, done from memory).
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