Ieri, oggi, domani

Vittorio De Sica (1963)

It’s unbelievable that Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (in 1965) but it’s better than the following year’s Vittorio De Sica-Sophia Loren-Marcello Mastroianni effort, Marriage Italian Style.  This is an anthology comedy, with the stars appearing as different characters in each of the three episodes.  The primacy of the women played by Sophia Loren in these stories – and, no doubt, of Loren in the international marketing of the picture (produced by her husband, Carlo Ponti, and Joseph E Levine) – is reflected in their titles.  In ‘Adelina of Naples’ (written by Eduardo Di Filippo and Isabella Quarantotti), the title character supports her unemployed husband Carmine (Mastroianni) and their child by selling black market cigarettes.  When she’s threatened with jail, Adelina gets pregnant since the law of the land proscribes the imprisonment of women who are either expecting or have a baby less than six months old.  The same stratagem is repeated until Carmine, after fathering seven children, is exhausted and Adelina chooses prison in favour of impregnation by the couple’s mutual friend (Aldo Giuffrè).  When the whole neighbourhood collects money and petitions for her release, she is freed and reunited with her large family.  In ‘Anna of Milan’ (adapted by Cesare Zavattini, Bella Billa and Lorenza Zanuso from an Alberto Moravia novella), Loren plays a tycoon’s wife, who decides that her husband’s Rolls Royce is more important to her than her lover Renzo (Mastroianni), with whom she’s driving in the car when they have an accident.   In ‘Mara of Rome’ (written by Zavattini), the heroine is a high-end prostitute, working from home; Mara’s clients include Mastroianni’s Augusto, the avid but twitchy son of a(nother) wealthy industrialist.   A young seminarian called Umberto (Gianni Rodolfi), staying with his morally conservative grandparents in a neighbouring apartment, is smitten with Mara and threatens to join the French Foreign Legion if she rejects him.  A desperate appeal from Umberto’s distraught grandmother (Tina Pica) determines Mara to set the boy back on the path to righteousness.  The increasingly frustrated Augusto is persuaded to assist in bringing her virtuous plan to fruition.

Vittorio De Sica does a fine job of animating the life of the Naples community in ‘Adelina’ and the basic joke of the story is a good one – but not good enough to justify its running time of around forty-five minutes.  At the start, I was hopeful that De Sica was going to treat the slender material playfully, almost fantastically – as when the local women and schoolboys take up in turn the chorus ‘She’s breeding!’ and it becomes a peripatetic, quasi-musical number.  Accomplished as Loren and Mastroianni are throughout, the later stages of ‘Adelina’ are desperately protracted.   It’s as well that ‘Anna’ is by some way the shortest segment.   A Christian Dior-dressed Loren may be meant to make the protagonist irresistible but Anna’s rich, bored selfishness is rebarbative.  As Renzo, Mastroianni achieves a decent characterisation, against the odds, moving from being sexually compelled by Anna to laughing at himself.  It probably helps that, once ‘Mara’ begins, you know you’re in the home straight but this is the most entertaining part of the film.  Sophia Loren is especially amusing when Mara takes her religious vow to restore the young priest to his celibate vocation.   (Gianni Rodolfi, much more effective here than as the eldest of the Loren character’s illegitimate sons in Marriage Italian Style, is graceful and rather touching as Umberto.)   The best-known bit is Mara’s concluding striptease for the sex-starved, sulking Augusto.  Loren, although she was supposedly nervous about doing this scene, carries it off with great aplomb.  Sitting taut with anticipation on the bed in Mara’s boudoir, and yelping occasionally, Mastroianni is extremely funny.   The first part of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is set in 1953; since the second and third parts both appear to happen in the present day, the ‘today and tomorrow’ distinction in the title doesn’t mean a lot.  The print we saw at BFI, although the result of a recent restoration job, was still not in great visual shape and the sound level was unsteady.

29 August 2015