Having discovered the Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli over my lockdown viewing I was curious to seek out other films she has starred in since her debut film, Pietro Germi's remarkable 1961 "Divorce Italian Style" in which she was paired with Marcello Mastroianni, who, incidentally, appears in "C'eravamo Tanto Amati" (Eng: "We All Loved Each Other So Much") in cameo during a reconstruction of the iconic Trevi Fountain scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita".
Far from being a singular homage to the zenith of Italian post-war cinema, the sequence is a key to the several nods to classic Italian cinema that run through the film with the point being made that the cinema of the post-war period played a significant role in Italy's view of itself during a period of reconstruction and of how it wished to be seen by the rest of the world following the years under Fascism.
The film uses all the devices familiar to followers of neo-realist cinema such as breaking the third wall, theatrical lighting conventions and creative use of editing to tell a story of the friendship forged between three men who are fighting to liberate Italy from Fascism at the end of WWII and their subsequent lives and loves spanning 3 decades during a period of relative stability and to the present day of the mid 1970's.
The film opens with a scene set in the present as a small car pulls up outside a large country estate and three people get out, two men and a woman, and approach the gate of the property. One of the men appears to have a drivers license that he has used to identify the name and address of the resident of the property.
They peer over a low wall to see a man (Vittorio Gassman) in a dressing gown climb a ladder to a diving board before leaping off. At this point the film freezes as the man is poised mid-leap before cutting to one of the men watching him, who addresses the camera to the effect that this montage is both the start and end of the film you are about to watch.
This device runs through the film as each of the three men preface each episode of their lives from the end of WWII as resistance fighters to the present, and how their lives became intertwined with that of the woman (Stefania Sandrelli).
The three men's lives diverge at the end of the war and the plot details how their ideals are gradually eroded by life, and their love for the same woman, "Luciana" (Sandrelli) - "Antonio" (Nino Manfredi) becomes a hospital orderly who is immediately struck by Luciana, a patient , "Nicola" (Stefano Satta Flores) is an intellectual and the most idealistic of the three and who has a passion for cinema, and "Gianni" (Vittorio Gassman), the most educated of the three, becomes a trainee in a law firm.
The film shifts to an afternoon many years after the end of the war and the three friends who were previously bonded by their youthful idealism have drifted apart and lost contact with each other.
A series of vignettes reveal their lives through the 50's and into the 60's, Nicola, a teacher and now married with a young child, rows with his employer over the political importance of Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" after a screening of the film and subsequently loses his job, leaves his wife and child and sets off the pursue his goal of being a respected film critic in Rome.
Antonio and Luciana are in a relationship and are spending an evening in a restaurant and favourite haunt of the three friends when Gianni, now an up-and-coming lawyer, re-enters their lives and turns their lives upside down as both he and Luciana are instantly smitten by each other. Scola employs theatrical devices echoed in a scene where Luciana, an aspiring actress, insists that Antonio accompany her to a theatrical performance that he is ultimately unimpressed by and where creative lighting effects are used to highlight the relationships between characters and a similar effect is used to emphasise the instant attraction Luciana and Gianna have for each other.
Antonio has to decide between his friendship and bond with Gianni and his love for Luciana and he chooses to step aside, and the two lovers embark on a passionate but tumultuous relationship as Antonio is left to mull over his decision.
Nicola, the aspiring film critic, re-enters the lives of the three friends and we discover that he has had little success in pursuing his career and is living in near poverty and when Gianni dumps Luciana, Nicola makes a play for her and takes her in, falling in love with her in the process, while Luciana for her part is bitter over her break-up with Gianni but still loves Antonio.
Devastated by the end of her affair with Gianni and upset that he seems to prioritise his burgeoning career as a lawyer acting on behalf of a corrupt businessman and property magnate, Luciana takes an overdose at the hostel for actresses where she is staying and where Antonio nurses her back to health and when Gianni receives the news from his old friend, he hesitates from visiting her and realises that Antonio is still in love with her, with the guilt that he had stolen her from him playing on his mind.
A scene showing Gianni and Luciana in a restaurant where she throws a bowl of soup over him and is followed by the two rowing with each other implies that Gianni is still seeing Luciana even after he has entered into a loveless but strategic relationship that eventually leads to marriage with the daughter of his client, "Elide" (Giovanna Ralli), who is besotted by him.
The aspiring actress Luciana is not ready to resume her relationship with Antonio and has moved on in her life, but she is later briefly reunited with him when an ambulance he is riding in is stopped at a road block because of a film crew that is shooting the famous "Trevi Fountain" scene from Fellini's "la Dolce Vita". He spots Luciana talking to Marcello Mastroianni (appearing as himself) before she is introduced as a rising star to Federico Fellini (also appearing as himself) - a scene that refers to "Divorce Italian Style" in the sense that the film featured breakout roles for both Mastroianni and Sandrelli.
Luciana and Antonio discuss their past relationship before a smooth looking man turns up whom Luciana introduces as her agent, but Antonio believes he is also her lover and attacks him out of jealousy.
Meanwhile, Gianni, now a successful lawyer, is revealed to have no scruples about compromising his ideals for money. and when an opportunity arises with the promise of inheriting his ailing father-in-laws' lucrative businesses and estate, after he blackmails him by threatening to reveal his dodgy business dealings.
Later, married with two children, Gianni joins his new family to watch TV (three TV's, as if to highlight their profligate spending) and sees his old friend Nicola appearing on a game show answering questions on cinema. This causes him to reflect on the gluttony and lack of social niceties of his "nouveau riche" in-laws who chow down on meat like pigs at a trough and who have no interest in the questions being asked in the game show.
Nicola wins the jackpot and success and the promise of marital happiness seems to finally be within his reach but he is tempted to try again for a bigger win and promptly loses it all.
Gianni' married life is loveless and in a bedroom scene, his wife Elide is reading a book on sexuality and asks him about orgasms but he appears disinterested. As the marriage begins to disintegrate Elide records herself on tape pondering about the afterlife in a scene that seems to reference Fellini's "Juliette of the Spirits", and when she confronts Gianni about his true feelings for her she gets a vague reply. She drives off, with Gianni in pursuit, and then the film cuts abruptly to a scene in a breakers yard for cars where Gianni imagines seeing the ghost of Elide, who has killed herself in her car, talking to him, which again reinforces the reference to the Fellini film.
At the start of the 70's the three friends meet up for a reunion dinner in a restaurant and their respective lives could not be more different, Nicola, by now a film journalist eking out a living on a meagre income but still a failure, Antonio, happy-go-lucky and still an innocent, still resents Gianni for stealing Luciana from him and Gianni has inherited his wealthy father-in-law's estate, a fact he keeps to himself, and their disappointments come to a head during a drunken brawl afterwards - it is during this squalid brawl in a car park that Gianni's and Nicola's driving licenses get mixed up and Gianni has walked off in a huff leaving the two friends wondering how they will get it back to him, a scene that sets up the opening of the film.
A quarter century in the friend's lives has elapsed when Gianni is seen trying to extricate his car (a Jaguar) from a block of parked cars in the centre of the city- an insight into the traffic congestion problems of Rome in the 70's. By coincidence Antonio pulls up in his tiny Fiat and notices Gianni with his sleeves rolled up helping drivers access their cars when in reality he is trying extricate his own car, and he calls out to him in surprise, having not seen him for so many of the intervening years.
Believing that Gianni has been reduced to working as a car park attendant and is, like them,
on his uppers, Antonio is unaware that the reality is very different and Gianni makes no effort to make things clear about the true nature of his life as wealthy heir to a construction firm. Gianni takes some money from a motorist whose car he has helped to move out of the way without a word, leaving Antonio to wonder how his old friend, a man with so many prospects compared to himself and Nicola, has been reduced to such a state. As he drives off with a fond farewell we hear Gianni thinking aloud that he will probably see Antonio in another 25 years, in other words, never again, so far removed is he from the man he was before the end of the war as a fellow idealistic freedom fighter.
The film makes several leaps forward in time and on one such moment, set in the early 1970's, Antonio invites Gianni to accompany him and Nicola to a protest meeting by lower income parents outside a school demanding the right of schooling for their children and it is here that Gianni sees Luciana for the first time in many years and realises that he loved and lost her. However when he questions her she says that it was never reciprocated from her side and was more a case of lust, and when Antonio announces that they are married, he leaves the protest, heartbroken.
At this point the film rolls back to the scene at the beginning as Antonio, Luciana and Nicola pull up at a country estate after finding Gianni's drivers licence. As they watch him they realise that he has traded his ideals for a comfortable life, in stark contrast to his friends who remained true to them, but at the same time realising that their ideals would never guarantee stability or success, however they feel no envy, only perhaps disgust.
The story could be that of any three people embarking on life and of how things never turn out as planned or hoped, counterpointed by the idealism and social conscience that underpinned the neo-realist cinema of the post-war period that aimed to encapsulate hopes for future. In many ways the films of Fellini arguably captured the dichotomies and contradictions of post-war Italy more successfully than his contemporaries while still retaining the qualities of Commedia Al'Italiana, hence the repeated references to his films seen in ""C'eravamo Tanto Amati" and for the director, Ettore Scola, it might have a been a way to reconcile the aims of the directors of an earlier generation with the realities of the world 3 decades later.
Another point the film makes, as if to balance the fact that their youthful ideals have not come to fruition in the post-war years, is one anticipated in an exchange between Gianni and his future father-in-law where he states that by becoming rich you also become isolated from your fellow men, by comparison to the poor who may be materially less well-off but who have each other, something that proves to be prophetic in Gianni's case as at the start of and later in the film he is seen to be the sole occupant of his late father-in-laws' lavish home following the untimely death of his wife and after all his children have flown the coop. This is in stark contrast to his former friends and in particular Luciana who have tracked him down using his driving license and who may be poorer but have each other, even if they perpetually squabble over their differing ideals and political positions.
There is a definite sense of deja vu in this film due to the filmic references that suggests that cinema reaches into people's lives and offers a frame of reference for common experience and Ettore Scola anticipates this using filmic devices like repetition of the same shot (which I thought was a broadcasting error, initially) during the opening titles of Antonio's car pulling up at Gianni's palatial residence that would suggest that this is an old story that could apply universally, endlessly repeated across time and that lends the film a mythic quality.
However, "C'eravamo Tanto Amati" isn't a simple essay on the collision of personal ideals with hard realities, something revealed in a scene where Nicola, the film critic, attends a rally where Vittorio De Sica, his hero at the start of the film, (presented as archive news footage) talks about his classic film "Bicycle Thieves" as being a call to arms for the poor in impoverished postwar Italy, but Antonio's reaction appears cynical and he remarks that despite the power of the film very little has changed in a material sense for the poor or downtrodden, apart from enhancing De Sica's reputation, and Ettore Scola appears to suggest that, equally, we must be wary of the artifice of the medium of cinema to sway public emotion and opinion.
Edited : I initially based this review on a version of the film available on YouTube and missed many of the plot nuances that became clearer after viewing the restored version on Criterion Channel and so have corrected some subsequent errors in my first reading of the film.
09/09/2024
"C'eravamo Tanto Amati", Dir: Ettore Scola, 1974
Criterion Channel