Ettore Scola (1931-2016) began his career as a screenwriter of broad farces, many of them for Dino Risi, credited as one of the maestros of the Italian film comedy style to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. After a dozen years scripting such hits as Risi's classic Il Sorpasso (1962), Scola directed his first feature, Let's Talk About Women (1964), an episodic comedy of romance and relationships starring the actor who would become his most frequent star, Vittorio Gassman. It's a mistake, however, to think of Scola's work as mere comic entertainment. Like Risi, his pictures, funny as they are, derive much of their humor from satirizing the class disparities of everyday Italian life and the high-level corruption that has frequently characterized the country's government.
"From childhood, history has been a subject that fascinated me," Scola said, and his sympathy went to the ordinary people who didn't get to make the big historical choices but had to live with them.
Such is the case with We All Loved Each Other So Much, which follows the lives of three men over the course of 30 years, from World War II to the 1970s. Once fellow Resistance fighters with a shared idealism despite their very different backgrounds (proletarian, bourgeois, intellectual), the three find their ideals and their bond tested by the disillusioning realities of post-war life. "We wanted to change the world, instead the world has changed us," one of the characters notes. (Scola once quipped that his film should have been titled "C'eravamo tanti delusi/We Were So Disappointed.")
Notable films in many countries have dealt with similar themes. Scola's stands out by incorporating into its saga a detailed and passionate consideration of Italy's greatest artistic movement of modern times, neorealism, the cinematic style that emerged in the 1940s. Its early proponents, among them Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica (to whom We All Loved Each Other So Much is dedicated), focused on stories about the poor and working class, filmed on location and often with non-professional actors, depicting the difficult conditions of Italian life.
We tend to think of neorealism today as a set of aesthetic choices - black and white, gritty, naturalistic, unadorned. Scola's thesis is that neorealism went beyond notions of mere style to express the deep-rooted ideals of the Resistance for a new national identity. Through the character of Nicola, a radical cineaste who claims that De Sica's Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette (1948) determined the entire course of his life, Scola asserts the movement was also a potential agent for reform and that all post-war Italian films, even comedies like his and Risi's that were initially a reaction against neorealism, owe a huge debt to this artistic antecedent.
To drive home his point, Scola incorporates excerpts and evocations of films by De Sica, Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni appear as themselves in a funny recreation of the filming of the famous Trevi Fountain scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), and De Sica is seen in archival footage talking about Bicycle Thieves. There are snippets of other movies and a seduction played out as one character attempts to instruct another in the wonders of Eisensteinian montage on Rome's Spanish Steps. The film also wrings humor from a running motif relating to Eugene O'Neill's use of asides in his 1928 play Strange Interlude.
All of which sounds like an intellectual exercise (perhaps more of a distinctly French one), a culture buff's journey through his personal interests and delights, but Scola is using the cultural references with far more purpose to assert his belief that "cinema must also collaborate to change the world" (quoted in Parla il cinema II by Aldo Tassone) and to illustrate the disappointments - cinematic, political, economic and romantic - encountered by his very human and sympathetic characters and the social milieu in which their lives unfold. It is a sad, dark story in so many ways, but one that is, as Vincent Canby said in his 1977 New York Times review, "paced by outrage and high spirits."
Director: Ettore Scola
Producers: Pio Angeletti, Adriano De Micheli
Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli and Ettore Scola
Cinematography: Claudio Cirillo
Editing: Raimondo Crociani
Production Design: Luciano Ricceri
Music: Armando Trovajoli
Cast: Nino Manfredi (Antonio), Vittorio Gassman (Gianni), Stefania Sandrelli (Luciana), Stefano Satta Flores (Nicola), Giovanna Ralli (Elide), Aldo Fabrizi (Romolo Catenacci)
By Rob Nixon
