Offscreen Notes
Ettore Scola: 1931-Jan. 16. 2016
It has been a sad stretch of late with recent losses of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, and now the death of Italy’s important screenwriter turned director Ettore Scola, at the age of 84. Scola may not have been in the upper echelon of greats along with Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, and others, but he was a rare talent with the gift of matching comedy with bittersweet melancholia. Still my favorite of his films is La Famiglia (1987), which follows six decades of a middle class family from the 1920s to the 1980s. Structurally the film is fascinating in the way it marks movements forward in time with successive slow, tracking shots through the house’s main corridor. The film never leaves the house and shifts in time are noted by the mise en scene. Another standout is A Special Day (1977), which is also bound mainly inside a large tenement building and takes place on the day of Hitler’s first visit to Italy in 1938. The heart of the film is the unlikely friendship that grows between two tenants largely from their mutual dislike of Fascism, a left wing homosexual named Gabriele (Marcello Mastrioanni) and housewife Antonietta (Sophia Loren).
