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Rating: Il_Paolo "E...state con me" n. 2
Hello guys/girls, with the arrival of summer, as is more or less well known to everyone, the beaches of the peninsula are filled with Italians, foreigners, and especially foreign women, giving rise to an eternal collective social ritual, and some expert might say "anthropological," in which the male (otherwise known as "vitellone") targets the female (otherwise known as "squinzia," or similar terms) believing he can conquer her; this without realizing that - even before having chosen the prey - it is in some ways the prey that has chosen him: with understandable reversals of meaning regarding the role of the hunter and the hunted, and regarding the fact that the natural selection of our species is, in fact, guided by the so-called fairer sex, and not by the homo homini vitiello.
The depiction of these hunting rituals is typical of our so-called "major" Italian cinema (Fellini was the first to coin the term "vitellone"), but it reaches its peak in so-called "minor" cinema, and, above all, in this delightful film ('83), from the well-known Bolognese duo Gigi & Andrea, primarily active in television in the '80s (who doesn't remember the scene of mother and son in "Grand Hotel," aired on Mediaset, or the spectacular series "Don Tonino," broadcast on the Biscione networks?).
The story is rather simple, but in its apparent simplicity, it is already stereotypical, indicative of behaviors not attributable to the individual, but to the human species (partition of the animal one) itself: thus to innate behaviors in the Italian individual, who devotes himself to flirting on the beach with the natural spontaneity with which a puppy, after about nine months, spontaneously learns to raise its rear leg to urinate: essentially, Gigi & Andrea, having left Bologna pretending to go to Acapulco, lodge in a modest little inn in some village of the Romagna coast in search of female fauna with which to satisfy their lewd desires; the film describes their repeated attempts to flirt, almost a compulsive repetition, with various types of women (the most interesting, let's break the taboo, is the mother with a little child in tow), which variously fail until our protagonists decide to return to their home city. Here, in a sunny and deserted Bologna, where the city arcades cast metaphysical shadows on Our heroes à la De Chirico, Gigi & Andrea encounter an old and ugly acquaintance (Gegia!!!!), deciding to unwillingly pair up with her and a not less ugly friend of hers in an attic with a view of the Asinelli Tower, as both a phallic symbol and a symbol of power (as it is known that "cummannari e chiù meglio ca...").
The journey of Gigi & Andrea appears thus as an attempt to deconstruct the "culture" of origin, abandoning the city towards the exoticism and "natural" freedom of the beach, yet doomed to failure (almost as if man, recognizing his nature, returns to perceive his own weakness, impotence, and mortality), for a seemingly reassuring return to the ordinary enjoyment of the senses, under the shadow of urban power and culture, which sublimates the senses and the hidden urges of the individual. In summary, it is a nimble and unconscious compendium of the frustrations of the human being as a sexual agent, well-packaged inside a (poisonous) Romagna piadina.
It must certainly be said that, beyond the hidden symbolic meaning of the story, the film appears inferior, in terms of staging and acting, even to the standards of my beloved minor cinema: the acting does not thrill me (except in "Don Tonino", the two protagonists are excellent co-stars but cannot carry an entire feature film), and there is, in the background, an aura a bit too slapdash and superficial. Unless the medium is the message: where a squalid film essentially reproduces, the squalid but inevitable mechanisms of human racial reproduction. However, let it be remembered the bare breast of Gegia, truly one of the lowest points of world cinematography, I assure you.
In summary, a perhaps negligible film, which nonetheless has the merit of making us reflect, even under the blazing sun, perhaps while we do not underestimate the beauty of our stand neighbor, how the eternal struggle of man to conquer the female is not an expression of autonomous volition, but is sometimes the unfolding of a natural design, that of the species aimed at self-preserving through the encounter between significant individuals of the pack. With the awareness that any possible rejection or success does not, in truth, depend on our individual ineptitude, but on the balance of nature and an objective process of natural selection.
With this, I do not feel inclined to disparage in advance those who voluntarily withdraw from this struggle for survival, spending their days on the beach reading the Gazzetta, solving puzzles of a periodical or a South American classic, playing paddleball or taking long walks on the shoreline, avoiding children's buckets and docking paddleboats, hoping for the imminent arrival of the September breezes.
Naturally Yours,
Il_Paolo
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