Brutti, sporchi e cattivi

This is an extraordinary film. A pitiless portrait of human race. Scola describes the life of poor and marginal people with no compassion, showing all their miseries and perfidies. In this sense, the film is very close to another masterpiece, Viridiana from Bunuel. Everything in this movie is so disconcerting (beginning with the slum which has a magnificent vista to St. Peter's Cathedral) that it also remembers me of David Lynch's works. Besides all that, the film is absolutely hilarious.

Nino Manfredi, only professional actor here, shines in this Ettore Scola movie as Giacinto Mazzarella, a former convict with a long series of crimes and a huge, quirky family. He's violent, vulgar, amoral; he lives surrounded by dirt, squalor and poverty. Yet, he's funny. This movie is too funny! Scola directs a group of actors headed by Manfredi, who shows off an irresistible accent, and by Maria Luisa Santella as Iside, Giacinto's mistress, a fat, sweet but silly woman with an "ancient name". But it isn't a carefree comedy: behind the quips and the jokes there's a grotesque depiction of a miserable reality not very far from San Pietro, the most important Catholic building in the world. Not a perfect film, but a very good one.

After all these years I still come back to this movie, enjoying a true art. Although it shows the so-called-life of the people from the bottom, it's still a beautiful portrait of the human race in its essence: we are truly ugly, dirty and evil inside, behind all those masks we wear. This is "human" deprived of all the "civilization". The movie itself is a masterpiece. All those shots, casting, directing, music, dialogs, scenes that make you cry and laugh and disgust you simultaneously, all led by the master Scola. One should not review any movie without previously watching this one. This is what any movie should be: a picture of life. Sometimes funny, but mostly loathsome. And we're all just animals inside, just give us a chance to show it. Highly recommended as "a must".

I would not call this a comedy. Maybe a tragicomedy. It is true, some scenes are funny. But that's not the point. The point is to give an hyper-realistic, painful portrait of extreme ignorance and poverty, and its consequences. These people cannot afford to be good, honest, or have any positive family feeling. Like prisoners in a Nazi camp, they are deprived of all their humanity. The only thing that keeps the family united is the shack they live in, and the idea of taking Giacinto's money. I want to stress the fact that the movie _is_ realistic. There _were_ shantytowns around Rome in the seventies. And the people _were_ like that. The constantly mocking and jocking attitude is a trait of the Roman popular culture. It does not mean they're happy and light-hearted. So beware, this movie won't just give you a good laugh. If you like it, check this out as well, I don't think you can buy it, but the Italian RAI TV showed it some time ago:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073339/

Almost fifty years later, this hyper-realistic and ruthless portrait of the misery of the slums, the outskirts of the big cities, in the case of the Italian capital, remains alive and impressive, in its visceral rawness.

At the time, Scola, like Pasolini before him, sought, above all, to denounce this suburban misery, as a product of capitalist society and the inequalities it generated. But barely twelve years later, and even before the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes dependent on it, Kusturica filmed the miserable flow of gypsies and other underprivileged people, from socialism, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Romania, towards begging, prostitution and crime, in the Italian slums, in Time of the Gypsies.

Today, it seems clear that this wound, which lasted for most of the second half of the 20th century in Europe, was caused by the massive, internal and external, migration phenomena, that followed the Second World War.

At present, the problem mainly involves south/north migration, to Europe and the United States, which is being attenuated through state intervention, in the temporary accommodation and repatriation of many migrants, not avoiding, even so, dramatic situations, which remind us, sometimes, the misery of post-war Europe.

A social classic, always worth revisiting.