Una giornata particolare
Ettore Scola (1977)
In May 1938, Adolf Hitler made a state visit to Italy, an event designed to confirm and celebrate the strength of Nazi Germany’s alliance with Fascist Italy under Mussolini. Ettore Scola’s drama takes place, as its title suggests, on a single day during that visit but A Special Day opens with newsreel footage of Hitler’s initial arrival in Rome, where he’s welcomed by Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel. This footage is surprisingly lengthy but so intrinsically interesting that the seven or eight minutes devoted to it don’t seem too much. The newsreel film is black and white; the early scenes in what follows are nearly monochrome, too. On-screen text at the start of this BFI screening, summarising the 2014 restoration of A Special Day, mentioned Pasqualino De Santis’ ‘unique’ cinematography. For once ‘unique’ is just about right. Throughout the film, the images are desaturated: the colour dial is turned up slightly from its original setting but muted tones, sepia and grey, still predominate, with just occasional flashes of heightened colour. The latter – because they draw attention to themselves – tend to be mildly distracting but De Santis’ lighting is undeniably ingenious.
The narrative proper kicks off with a vivid, funny sequence. It’s early morning. In one of the many homes in a high-rise block, Antonietta Taberi (Sophia Loren) makes coffee before rousing the rest of her family. As she moves round their apartment, waking her husband Emanuele (John Vernon) and each of her brood of children in turn, we begin to wonder just how many kids there are going to be. The final total is six, four sons and two daughters; a seventh child would qualify Antonietta and her husband for the government bonus payable to large families. The Taberis are all keen supporters of Mussolini. After breakfast, Emanuele and the children head off to watch the grand parade in Hitler’s honour that will take place in the centre of Rome, and Antonietta makes a start on the housework. Most of the neighbours also head off to the parade (a local holiday has presumably been called for the occasion). Except for Antonietta and the concierge (Françoise Berd), the block is deserted. When Antonietta, in her apartment several floors up, looks across to another high-rise, there’s little sign of life there either. Until …
… Antonietta’s mynah bird, its cage left open, flies out through the apartment window that’s open too, makes its way to the block opposite and settles on the window ledge of another apartment whose owner is at home. This is Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) – no surname. By the time Antonietta has rung his doorbell and he has gently and skilfully retrieved her bird, and returned it to her, Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari (who shares the screenplay credit with Scola), have begun to supply key information about Gabriele. Until recently, he was a radio announcer but he’s lost his job because of his ‘subversive’ tendencies. He’s not only anti-fascist but also homosexual; today, as he tells a(n unseen) friend on the telephone, is a special day for Gabriele because he’s about to be deported to Sardinia. Marcello Mastroianni meanwhile expresses the character’s mood and personality more subtly – through his neat gestures and slightly constricted walk, especially Gabriele’s movement as he puts a record on the gramophone and dances to it alone.
This first meeting between them doesn’t last long but, soon after Antonietta has returned home, Gabriele calls there with the gift of a book – The Three Musketeers. Antonietta has already confided in him about her unkind, unfaithful husband and her belief that Emanuele prefers educated women. Antonietta and Gabriele spend the next few hours together, during which time they learn more about, and warm to, each other. He teaches her the rumba, and they dance together. She’s at first appalled by his politics though never, it seems, by his sexuality. Even so, she wants him to have sex with her; he obliges but assures her afterwards this doesn’t mean he’s heterosexual. (I’m using ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ intentionally: it doesn’t sound right, given the historical context, to use ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.) Gabriele goes back to his own apartment shortly before Antonietta’s family returns from the parade. After the evening meal, when her husband and children have all gone to bed, Antonietta opens The Three Musketeers but keeps looking from the book to Gabriele’s apartment. Unaware of his impending deportation, she’s dismayed to see him leave the building, suitcase in hand, accompanied by plainclothes police. She switches off the kitchen light and enters the bedroom. Her husband said over supper that their seventh child would be another boy, this one to be named Adolfo.
A Special Day is very entertaining without being very convincing. That’s due principally to the casting of the female lead. Sophia Loren is a fine actress but more conspicuously a star. She’d enjoyed success playing ‘ordinary’ women, most notably in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960). Although that film isn’t good overall, the storyline – in particular, the physical and psychological ordeals endured by her character – enabled Loren to transmute her star quality into something heroic. In the more muted domestic setting of Ettore Scola’s drama, she’s far too vital and glamorous – it’s impossible to accept Sophia Loren as a downtrodden housewife. Marcello Mastroianni, though hardly short on good looks or charisma, shrinks himself much more successfully into his role. Loren isn’t the only problem. You can believe Antonietta is drawn to Gabriele because he’s a gent, charmingly different from what she’s used to, but the sex between them feels like something the script, rather than Antonietta, insists upon. When she gets the mynah bird safely home, she’s still careless about leaving the cage open briefly. Lucky for her that by now the mynah has served its dramatic purpose – (1) to show that the Taberi household contains two caged birds, both longing to spread their wings, (2) to bring Antonietta and Gabriele together. In other words, the mynah is seen and heard no more (it’s quite talkative in the early stages).
None of the youngsters playing the next generation of Antonietta’s family is particularly memorable. One’s bound to mention one of the daughters only because the actress concerned is Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter. She was a young teenager when A Special Day was made; now, after a chequered career in show business and politics, she’s a Forza Italia MEP. John Vernon is surprisingly right as Antonietta’s boorish husband but the standout supporting turn comes from Vernon’s fellow Canadian Françoise Berd as the snide concierge, who sports an impressive moustache. Ettore Scola’s continuing use of the big parade as background soundtrack – the tedious repetition of national anthems, and so on – works very well.
30 August 2025
