This highly entertaining film was screening as part of the
BFI’s season Monica Vitti: Creative Force which gives some of us Antonioni
obsessives the chance to see the actor’s broader work, and here we see the gift
for comedy which is hinted at in parts of L’Eclisse perhaps but here is
given full rein in what is now a period drama of swinging London and a Sicily
nursing a Victorian hangover with a Cosa Nostra side-salad. I was sat next to
an Italian family who got all of the jokes before the punchlines but overall,
the packed NFT1 audience had a hoot – laughing at us then and us now, Monica’s sardonic
star power eternally self-aware and simply cool.
It was a treat to see this modish diva playing amongst
fabulous locations from moist Georgian blocks of Edinburgh then on to a grimy
Sheffield still choking on the smoke of large-scale steel manufacture. A good
portion of the film I set in Bath, as ornate as many an Italian city, then to
London and then Brighton with the old pier still standing. We also had a rollcall
of leading men for Monica to play with including Tony Booth (Cheri’s father), Johnny
Briggs, Corin Redgrave and Stanley Baker – guess which one ends up with the
girl?
Given all this, it’s surprising that Mario Monicelli's film wasn’t
released in the UK but it did very well in Italy and Vitti won the Accademia
del Cinema Italiano David di Donatello for Best Actress whilst the film was
nominated for the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. Having seen so many
British comedies of this period, it’s altogether more coherent in tone and
fundamentally ridiculous rather than just trying to fit in current cultural
references. In this way it reminded me of Tinto Brass’ Col Cuore in Gola
(1967) which was partly filmed at the legendary International Times fundraising
24 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace (John Lennon was there, Syd’s
Floyd, Soft Machine et al). Counter-cultural history, right there in the
background… Brass caught the moment when almost no one else did and his compadriot catches the background hum of a country yet to realise what is happening to it below the top-leve glamour of the moment.
Ultimately it’s a film of liberation for Vitti’s character,
Assunta Patanè whose traditional Sicilian situation – family, men, an imagined
and real, Greek Chorus of disappointment – weigh too ludicrously heavy on her
ability to grow up. Director Mario Monicelli creates a mood not unlike Almodóvar’s
early sexual farces with the same logical illogic as found in Vincente Aranda’s
early work in a Spain still ruled by Franco’s censorship. The Italians had no
such restriction and, whilst this is a joke at Sicily’s expense, it does have
the general messaging about men and women’s role in (Catholic?) society.
This latter point is not made lightly and it was only in
1965 that the case of young Sicilian Franca Viola had been in the news after
she refused a matrimonio riparatore with the man who had raped her and
kidnapped her when she was just 17. This would have left her as a dishonoured
woman who, having had sex out of marriage, was supposed to marry her assailant.
It sounds mad because it is and it is worth reading up on this instance which had
a huge impact on Italian law as well as the lives of those involved.
This cause celebre informs the seemingly incomprehensible
opening when Assunta is kidnapped by mistake and then seduced by Vincenzo
Macaluso (the excellent Carlo Giuffrè) who really wanted her cousin but makes
do with what has been “delivered”. At the start there is the seemingly
ridiculous sight of a group of men dancing together on a village rooftop as
Assunta and her friends watch from a room across the way… dancing before
marriage being almost as much of a crime as sex?
It’s useless, you look at me with dead fish eyes… I’m an
honest woman!
After the deed is done Assunta finds that Vincenzo has fled
to England leaving her and her family dishonoured. Her fiancé can not marry her
and she cannot be a part of society until she has righted the wrong and, as
there are no men in her family she is given a gun and sent to track down and assassinate
the man who did her wrong.
Only now do we get the title sequence as the train departs,
the ferry crosses and we’re whizzing through the British countryside up to
Edinburgh where Vincenzo is to be found. It’s a long way from Polignano a Mare
in Apulia where the initial scenes were shot to Waverley Station and the Scottish
capitol’s stone streets have barely changed. Assunta approaches a woman in a
pink coat who is looking for a housekeeper – “mi scusi, Mister…” (Vitti’s
Itanglish is a delight throughout) and asks her the location of the Capri
Restaurant where her target is working. And then we have it, MONICA VITTI
walking around Edinburgh including some unsuspecting by-standers.
There’s a man, dressed as a woman…
She stops at the junction of Upper Bow and Johnson Terrace before
spotting the Capri. Vincenzo is too quick for her and takes his leave … and
this is very much the way as our heroine begins an educative journey across the
country to find herself as well as her man. Travelling Britain doesn’t always
work this way but Assunta’s contact with the welcoming intellectuals of the
Sullivan family is the beginning of her sentimental education. She works as a
maid for them and encounters The Kilt for the first time at their party,
running off to the kitchen to burst out laughing. It was a different time.
Vincenzo calls from Sheffield in the middle of the party and
as Assunta passionately remonstrates with him in the living room, Mrs Sullivan
translates her half of the conversation as their guests sit aghast.
So to the Steel City, absolutely covered in industrial
grime, where she finds a man called John (Booth) wearing fine Italian shoes and
ill-advised white jeans and working on his E-Type Jaguar – the symbol of
Swinging Sixties success. Luckily John speaks some Italian and takes her to a
disco where they ask about Vincenzo and, after Johnny Briggs get’s too fresh
she insists on her new English man giving him a hiding. They go to John’s terraced
house – they’re all black, says Assunta – agreeing on separate rooms then watching
rugby on TV.
What sort of a man are you? I don’t understand. You look.
TV. Two hours…
A rugby match takes them to Bristol where Assunta sees the
object of her murderous attention as an ambulance man. She finds out which
hospital he works at and is off to “Barts” in Bath… where she encounters
handsome Dr Osborne (Stanley Baker) and a man called Frank (Corin Redgrave) who
has just tried to take his own life. Assunta gives him some of her blood and she
listens as he drives her around Bath about his unfaithful lover and the reasons
for his broken heart…
The same skills of emotional control and almost burying her
thoughts in drama films also allow Vitti to hit the mark with so many
punchlines… for this level of farce to work you just have to take it seriously
and she’s within the unreality and without the need to labour the points which
– perhaps with the quicker reaction times of my Italian neighbours to each
zinger – makes them funnier.
Her conversion to an English-speaking, liberated woman by
the last section of the film, allows her effortless sophistication to
counter-balance Vincenzo’s old school thinking as he attempts to woo her back
as his “property” … it’s fascinating watching her in character work these
scenes on two levels… is she reverting back to old certainties or planning
moral revenge?
We saw a sparklingly digital copy of a new 4k restoration which
brought Monica and Swinging Sicily to life and really brought out the contrast between
sun-drenched Mediterranean starch and Great British grey days. Some fabulous
pubs and cars were also involved and I particularly liked Stanley Baker’s Rover
and Booth’s E-Type Jaguar – he always was a flash get!
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