Film Review
Although much of his work is largely forgotten today, Mauro Bolognini
was one of the leading Italian filmmakers of his generation, a daring
and sometimes controversial figure who played as large a role in the
rebirth of Italian cinema in the 1950s and 60s as his more flamboyant
contemporaries, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo
Antonioni. Bolognini's films are famous for their earthy
realism and lurid sensuality, typified by the famous orgy scene in
Il Bell'Antonio (1960), and they
provide as vivid a reflection of Italian society at the time as those
of any other filmmaker.
La
Notte brava (a.k.a.
The Big
Night or
Les Garçons)
is a good example not only of Bolognini's distinctive style of cinema,
which manages to bridge the gap between the gritty neo-realism of the
past and the sleek modernism that had started to emerge in the late
1950s, but also of his profound social conscience, in particular his
concern for the most pressing social issue of the time: mass
unemployment amongst the young.
Bolognini was not the only filmmaker to show an interest in this
subject matter. Italian cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s
is dominated by films featuring idle young men who, unable to find
work, resort to a life of petty crime, either to make ends meet or just
to fill the empty waking hours. The fruit of Fascism, which led
the country to ruin and humiliation in WWII, was a generation of lost
souls who drifted without purpose, living only for the moment and
contemptuous of the old values and old institutions, including the
church and marriage. Fellini portrays this age of vacuous
decadence most vividly in
La Dolce vita (1960), and Pier
Paolo Pasolini tackles it from a more realistic and humane perspective
in
Accattone
(1961). Bolognini's
La Notte
brava fits neatly between these two films - on the face of it,
it appears to glorify the carefree life of the debauched young, who
rob, violate and cheat each other without the slightest pang of
conscience so that they can indulge their carnal appetites to the full;
in fact, it is probably Italian cinema's bleakest commentary on a
generation that had, through no fault of its own, lost its way.
Bolognini first made a name for himself with
Gli innamorati (1955), a fine
example of neo-realist rosa depicting the tangled love lives of a group
of young working class people. Having made a few
anti-establishment comedies, Bolognini fell in with an aspiring young
screenwriter, Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he would make some of his
mostly highly regarded films.
La
Notte brava was one of the most successful films to come out of
the improbable Bolognini-Pasolini partnership, an adaptation of
Pasolini's 1956 novel
Ragazzi di vit
which created such a public outcry on its first publication that it was
heavily censored for its subsequent editions. The director and
screenwriter had very different ideas for the film and very nearly fell
out over the casting. A committed neo-realist, Pasolini wanted
non-professional actors for the lead roles, but the more commercially
minded Bolognini overruled him and cast a number of rising stars of
Italian and French cinema, including Franco Interlenghi, Laurent
Terzieff and Jean-Claude Brialy, thereby ensuring the film's
marketability outside Italy.
From the memorable opening sequence, in which two stunning prostitutes
hurl abuse at each other across a busy motorway, we have an immediate
sense of the direction of travel that the film will take.
Straight away, Bolognini gives us a visual metaphor for modern Italy, a
place where people can no longer connect with one another, where every
man (and woman) is an island, looking out for his own self-interest,
standing alone in an arid urban wasteland. Bolognini employs a
whole host of similarly barren locations in the film to drive home the
emptiness of the protagonists' lives and their inability to bond with
one another. It's a dog-eat-dog world the film shows us, and
everyone is out for what he can get, often by the dirtiest, most
underhand means at his disposal.
Having made some easy money by selling some stolen rifles, the
impossibly handsome male protagonists (Brialy, Terzieff and
Interlenghi) turn their hand to extorting something for nothing from a
trio of man-hating prostitutes they lure into their joy ride; needless
to say, they are outsmarted and the liberated modern woman scores a
minor victory over male chauvinism. After this misogynistic
feeding frenzy, Bolognini then treats us to a grandiose exhibition of
male bonding which culminates in the film's most notorious sequence, an
all-male orgy in a swanky Roman villa, of the kind that was no doubt
de rigueur two thousand years
previously. Bolognini spares us the sordid details but from the
homoerotic signals being fired in every direction, it is obvious that
heavy consumption of alcohol is not the only vice to have
been indulged in.
After their happy hour up at the villa, the three enterprising heroes
abscond with yet another wad of stolen cash and immediately fall out
with one another, proving that there is absolutely no honour amongst
thieves. The banknotes change hands several times before every
one of them is squandered in a night of pointless
pleasure-seeking. Once the night has passed, the characters
are all back where they started, with empty pockets and even
emptier stomachs, ready to repeat the whole adventure again.
Bolognini clearly doesn't expect his audience to identify with his
characters, who are selfish and narcissistic in the extreme, but it is
hard not to sympathise with them, condemned as they are to live a life
that is no more than a series of cheap hedonistic thrills intended to
distract from the sheer meaningless of their existence. It's a
long, dark night that Scintillone and Ruggeretto inhabit, and one that
feels depressingly familiar...
© James Travers 2013
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