pranzo di ferragosto

More often than not, more is less. This is beautifully shown in a small Italian movie, “Pranzo di Ferragosto”, that I just saw at the Italian Film Festival organized by the Italian Department at Yale.
It's a very good example of Italian comedy, and I will say nothing about that, since so many cinema historians and critics talk about it more competently than I could do.
What I really enjoyed was the film's humility. It's a short, poignant, disquieting divertissement on aging. Four old ladies are taken care of by the sixty-something son of one of them, in the wonderful, deserted, drowned-in-sunlight scenario that the center of Rome transforms into in the middle of August. Many movies have been shot in it, though, and so the part that is more visually original is the contrast between the lighted outside and the adumbrate interiors of the old genteel house of Gianni and his mother. The glorious past of the family is a realistic conceit: I myself have seen similar old apartments, hosting the same old, bejeweled, well-spoken ladies, babysat by their not-so-young unmarried devoted children.
It's a virtue of the movie that it does not attempt to analyze the mother-son relationship, but is content with showing it. A less intelligent director and writer would have put much more emphasis on this already too explored topic. Nor there is too much emphasis on the topic of abandonment of elderly people at Ferragosto, which is what every Italian news talk about every August. It is a squalid phenomenon, but not much more can be said or investigated. Italy and so many other countries face more and more the problems connected with an aging population, and too many middle-aged children do not want to, or are unable to, take care of their old parents as most of them deserve.
But the topic of the movie is not just aging itself, the immense sadness that is consequent to solitude and coming to terms with one's imminent death, or the involution that renders elderly people like children, making them needy, demanding, whimsical, silly, and naive. There's that too, and very well illustrated. From the very first scene, the old ladies behave mostly like little girls. But this too is a triviality that we see (and say) over and over. “Getting old is a bit like becoming children again”. If that were the main message of the movie, it would be disappointing. The geniality of this small comedy is to juxtapose that message with its opposite, in itself as banal: the elderly are not children, bur rather old adults. Unless they are demented, they are autonomous human beings, who have lived and experienced longer than the majority of those around them. As the genius “reading the hand” scenes suggests, where one of the guests reads the hand to all her friends, they have lived long lives and yet they are sufficiently human to desire and hope for more. They resort to being like children because that's the only way they can get some attention, but they would prefer to keep having an adult life. They want to chat with their children as if they were equal to them; they have the right to go out, smoke, drink, and be flirtatious; they can wear make-up and nice clothing, dance and watch tv until late at night if they want to. They have money, sometimes still more than their children. And that, sadly, seems the only thing that can protect their autonomy.
It is thanks to the perfect balance between these two trivialities that the film becomes original. But it is also brave, for a few reasons. First of all, it shows aging people. All the people in the movie except for the fisherman (whose pronunciation of Italian sounds slavic like that of the never -seen but often-mentioned Romanian care-takers) are over 50. Not many films portrays older people, and almost none portrays just them. And yet they are so many more than the youngsters that crowd our cinemas, both on and off the screen. Cinema is often thought of as something for young viewers and young actors. Showing old people is therefore audacious, almost revolutionary.
But showing them as old is even more brave. All indoor scenes are shot from a close distance. This technique on the one hand aims to make the viewer claustrophobic and empathize with Gianni, stuck in the small house with no way out. But on the other hand it makes us almost painfully aware of what old age looks like. The audience was squeamish and almost disgusted when the camera shoots a close-up of the oldest lady who is putting bright make-up on her spotted and wrinkled skin. I found it the saddest, but also most sincere reaction of the audience, and more meaningful than all of the laughter. Orange lipstick on the lips of a lady close to ninety makes us think of decomposition, not beauty. The other ladies are less old and one is definitely what is generally called “a beautiful old lady”, but once they get older, they will get more and more similar to each other, in the same way that children look alike when they are born. Another moment triggering disgust was when Gianni's mother is shot in silhouette, and small drops of saliva come out of her mouth as she speaks, tiny hairs on her face contrasting against the light. She is speaking French, and she is being as sophisticated as she always been, except that now she has fake teeth. Here again we feel squeamish, and ashamed of it, and forced to confront something we generally do not have to think of, when we go see a comedy: that even the most beautiful and young ones are made of flesh and bones, and will die, and will not necessarily look pretty while they do.
But it is also possible to look pretty, in fact. This is a comedy, after all, and the old ladies show us how that beyond physical decay the spirit and the mind can stay alive and well until the very last moment. Gianni's mother is the oldest, but also the most lively of them, and they all end up controlling their fate, while provoking our amusement. The final credits scene is in this respect the most unequivocally funny.
This is a small, good comedy. As all good comedies, you come out the theater with a smile that fades away as you go home.