Ettore Scola
Eternal masterpiece of Italian cinema, signed by the brilliant director Ettore Scola,able to give back the Fascist fatidic moment of italian history through two common characters outlooks. A Special Day is his relatively late film that is one of his most transcendent and trenchant films.
As two of the only people in their towering apartment complex who didn’t attend the fascist rally, they will find themselves sharing a communion of hopes and fears. Italian cinema dream team Marcello Mastroianni (Gabriele) and Sophia Loren (Antonietta) , for the whole movie are immersed in a sort of state of grace thanks to the perfect script that digs into small behaviours and gestures of ordinary people. Photography, expertly washed out by Pasqualino De Santis, accentuates the film's sense of squalor and sadnesss with remarkable hues that renders both -complex and inhabitants- as figments of an oppressive, joyless past.
Set in Rome in the late 30s, tells the story of a key date in Italian history: when on 6 May 1938, Adolf Hitler came to visit Benito Mussolini. While the whole block has gone to town-wide parade, Antonietta a resigned forty-year-old faded beauty housewife and Gabriele a persecuted homosexual radio announcer, both decide to stay at home when the family's pet bird escapes, she is brought to knock on the door of him. Over the course of the day, the two neighbours forge a very close friendship that will change their perceptions of love, politics and life itself.
A true masterpiece of world cinema. To the dialogue between Antonietta and Gabriele is superimposed the live reporting of the historic encounter: an element of invasive arrogance that underlines the oppression of these two. Exciting without being pathetic A Special Day proves to be extraordinarily effective in demolishing the most misleading aspects and the bald-faced hypocrisy of a fascism that, before becoming a political, acts above all at a socio-cultural level.
A Special Day
director ETTORE SCOLA
year 1977
director of photography PASQUALINO DE SANTIS
cast SOPHIA LOREN, MARCELLO MASTROIANNI, JOHN VERNON
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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