Old Yorker

  • A Special Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Sorry, Baby

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eva Victor (2025)

    Eva Victor, the writer-director of Sorry, Baby, also plays the lead, Agnes.  She’s an English literature scholar and each of the five sections of Victor’s narrative has a virtual chapter heading.  Set in New England in more or less the present day, the film begins with ‘The Year of the Baby’ and a visit from Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who was Agnes’ best friend and housemate when both were students at the liberal arts college where Agnes is now a faculty member.  Lydie, in a same-sex marriage and resident in New York, tells Agnes she’s pregnant.  The second section is ‘The Year of the Really Bad Thing’, which happened several years previously.  Then, moving forward in time, comes ‘The Year of Questions’ and ‘The Year of the Really Good Sandwich’.  The film eventually returns to the present, another ‘Year of the Baby’ – who has now arrived.  Lydie pays Agnes another visit, this time accompanied by her spouse Fran (E R Fightmaster) and their baby daughter.

    Like some of those chapter headings, the first half of Sorry, Baby is irritating.  Her first reunion with Lydie tells us little about Agnes, except that she mostly seems oppressed and is the youngest literature professor ever appointed by her college.  That information arrives during an evening meal that Agnes and Lydie share with three other people they first got to know as graduate students.  One of them, Natasha (Kelly McCormack), has also stayed on at the college to teach.  It’s she who announces Agnes’ rapid academic promotion, feigning envy in a way that makes it crystal clear that Natasha truly is envious.  It comes as little surprise in chapter two that the Really Bad Thing is a sexual assault, suffered by Agnes during her graduate studies, and that the perp is a male senior academic – her adviser, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi).  The assault takes place at Decker’s home.  Agnes spends an evening there and much of the film’s remaining screen time trying to come to terms with the rape.

    Eva Victor describes the Really Bad Thing with artful discretion, from outside Decker’s house, almost without moving the camera.  Agnes arrives at the front door; Decker asks her to remove her shoes before coming in; she does so and enters, the front door closing behind her.  It’s still light outside at this stage.  In the next shot, lights have gone on inside; in the shot after that, they’re more salient because it’s dark outside.  Then the front door opens, and Agnes comes out.  She sits on the steps outside the door, replacing her shoes, before heading back home, where she tells Lydie what has happened to her.

    The next scenes are the film’s worst.  No one except Lydie treats Agnes right.  Accompanied by her friend to a hospital, Agnes is interviewed by a male doctor (Marc Carver).  He’s not unsympathetic, though he tends to express himself a bit clumsily.  When he says, ‘I know this is hard to talk about’, Lydie sarcastically replies, ‘It doesn’t feel that you know that’; as the doctor flounders, her reprimands get harsher.  Agnes is on her own when she meets subsequently with two female college staff, who beat the doctor hands down for insensitivity.  ‘We know what you’re going through – we are women,’ says the younger one.  Her older colleague (Liz Bishop) tells Agnes she can report the assault to the police if she wants but that the college no longer has jurisdiction over Decker who, just before his evening with Agnes, had sent the college authorities an email explaining he’d got a new post elsewhere.  If Agnes had done her thesis in film studies rather than literature, she might have known what Eva Victor as a screenwriter clearly knows:  when people change jobs in movies or on TV, it happens just like that – there’s never the tedious complication of a notice period.

    In the third and shortest chapter, Agnes is vetted for jury service.  She’s discharged after admitting she’s not confident she could be an impartial juror because of her own ordeal, and that she didn’t want her rapist to serve time because doing so wouldn’t have made him a better person.  Agnes is wary of the questions she’s asked by a legal bod (Hettienne Park) but seems to realise that the latter, who shows some emotional intelligence, is an improvement on those she met in the assault’s immediate aftermath.  By now, Sorry, Baby is improving, too:  for a start, Agnes has adopted a stray kitten (and we know that it survives – at least, she owns an adult cat when Lydie visits at the start of the film).  Victor also describes developments in her protagonist’s personal and professional lives.  She starts a tentative sexual relationship with her pleasant, awkward neighbour, Gavin (Lucas Hedges).  She’s offered a full-time professorship and incredulously, excitedly accepts.  It makes a difference once Agnes’ insecurity and anxiety are seen as part of a larger existence that’s in some ways fulfilling.

    That said, the college’s literature syllabus and Agnes’ continuing career there, aren’t too convincing because Eva Victor makes them, as she might say, Really Significant.  Given the traumatic associations of the place, it’s surprising Agnes doesn’t look to move elsewhere:  far from it – she replaces Decker and moves into what used to be his office.  In the film’s only classroom sequence, Agnes is teaching Lolita!  This sequence is bizarre in several ways.  One of the class, Jeremy (Conor Patrick Sweeney), complains about the material; Agnes, eager to show she’s not a cancel-culture vulture, points out that, while Nabokov’s content might be questionable, it’s important to recognise the novel’s literary qualities.  Fair enough, says Jeremy.  It seems highly unlikely in an American liberal arts college de nos jours that only one student voice would be raised to query the choice of Lolita and would then be so easily satisfied.  (It’s also odd that Agnes has the class reading aloud from Lolita without in any way analysing the text, as if they were much younger kids.)  Another student points out that someone is staring into the classroom – ‘that woman again’.  Agnes, glancing at the window in the classroom door, smiles and likens the visitor’s persistence to Humbert Humbert’s.  Jeremy congratulates Agnes, without irony, on her witty comparison.

    The woman staring in is Natasha who, in the scene between them that follows, not only vents her fury at Agnes’ professorship but also informs her that, as a student, she too had sex with Preston Decker.  As she drives away from campus and imagines Decker and Natasha in bed together, Agnes suffers a panic attack and stops her car suddenly outside a sandwich shop.  The owner (John Carroll Lynch) tells her to take deep breaths, then makes Agnes the Really Good Sandwich.  John Carroll Lynch is excellent in his few minutes on screen and Sorry, Baby is generally well acted, at least when the actors have a chance.  (Kelly McCormack doesn’t:  Natasha is a disastrous conception.)  Eva Victor gradually wins you over.  As Lydie, Naomi Ackie’s vitality complements Victor’s prevailing moroseness in the opening ‘Year of the Baby’ section; in the closing section, Ackie makes Lydie interestingly quieter and more pliable in the company of Fran.  Lucas Hedges’ most recent film appearances have been few and I’ve not seen them.  He plays gentlemanly Gavin with good comic timing and a nice uneasy charm but Hedges seems to be getting typecast as sensitive, essentially unthreatening characters.  (His breakthrough performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) gave promise of a much larger potential.)

    The discreet humour of scenes describing Agnes’ physical relationship with Gavin is the upside of Victor’s tastefulness.  The downside is that too much in the film is implied.  We assume that, as students, Agnes and Lydie were lovers – they certainly slept in the same bed – but there’s no explicit confirmation of that.  Any evidence of the pair being drawn together partly by shared intellectual interests is circumstantial; however much Lydie talks, it’s never about books or ideas.  An important, unfortunate upshot of Victor’s low-key approach is that, without the Really Bad Thing at its centre, Sorry, Baby would seem self-indulgent and inconsequential – an impression reinforced by the film’s closing scene.  When Lydie and Fran go out for the day, Agnes is left holding the baby, whose name is Jane.  In effect talking to herself, Agnes speculates on Jane’s future.  She says she can’t promise Really Bad things won’t happen in the course of Jane’s life but that, if they do, Agnes will always be there for her.  Eva Victor clearly means this coda to be tender but it’s a bit icky.  It may also leave you wondering how Sorry, Baby could have ended if Lydie had unfortunately given birth to a baby boy.

    26 August 2025

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