Il Sorpasso

It’s summer and a holiday and, somehow, Rome is closed. The streets are empty, sidewalks are barren and hot, and, worst of all, the taverns and, even, the little soda-shops are all masked by steel shutters. A man drives a tiny sports car, whirling through the empty streets, making u-turns and, at last, summoning someone who happens to be looking at him from a window -- the man in the window is a shy law student played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. The man driving aimlessly in the sports car is Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassman), “il Sorpasso” -- that is, the one who surpasses others, or, more prosaically, the guy who is always passing other cars on Italy’s winding and mountainous roads. Dino Rosi’s 1962 picture was an enormous box-office hit in Italy and it’s easy to see why this big, open-hearted film would be popular -- it is the quintessential road picture. Bruno talks his way into the law student, Robert’s, apartment. The student is buttoned-up, conservative, introspective -- from time to time, we hear his thoughts in a voice-over. (This device, which grounds the audience in Robert’s perspective makes the ending of the film all the more shocking.) Robert has thick books open on his desk and he’s trying to grasp the distinction between void or voidable contracts; the woman that he admires, Valeria Nisi, has a name that suggests ancient legal procedure as well and in a discouraging way -- “nisi” means something like “nothing.” Bruno, who is quick and intuitive and fantastically handsome -- he looks like a harder, stronger Rock Hudson -- persuades Robert into taking a ride with him in the country. For all his brash talk, Bruno is at loose ends, estranged from his wife and daughter, and, apparently, lonely. Bruno motors along the coast, passing every vehicle that they encounter, and, gradually, Robert warms to the older man and, over the course, of 30 hours or so, the time spanned by the picture, they become friends. Bruno is a kind of monster, passionate, sardonic, and impulsive -- he is the sort of man who takes a cigarette out of a stranger’s mouth when he needs a smoke. Every woman that they meet he tries to seduce and most of them are mildly interested in him, although they understand instinctively that Bruno is dangerous. Chasing two German girls in their little sports car, Bruno momentarily loses sight of them, stops at an intersection, and literally sniffs the air. The scent of the girls leads the men to a cemetery, probably a relic of the second World War, where the two German women are languidly reading names on tombstones. Bruno and Robert are put off by the sepulchral setting and retreat, much to the dismay of one of the German girls who is interested in an adventure. Next, they travel to a hilltop palazzo where Robert spent his summers as a child. Bruno entertains Robert’s aunt and uncle and, in the course of three hours, learns more about them and establishes a closer relationship than the law student was ever able to achieve with these people who are, of course, his relatives. In the darkness, Bruno drives to a seaside resort and, after a drunken brawl in a night club, ends up at his ex-wife’s house. He tries his lost puppy routine on his steely former wife who literally knocks him out of bed. The two men end up sleeping on the beach, waking to a riot of sunbathing girls and boys. Bruno water-skis with his daughter’s fiancée, a man who seems to be older than him, and, then, tries to restore his relationship with her. Everyone likes Bruno and most women, it seems, would be willing to sleep with him for a few weekends, but, in the end, no one really takes him seriously -- he’s simply too handsome, too egotistical, too childishly frank and abrasive. (In a way, the character played by Larry David in “Curb your Enthusiasm” is a Jewish variant on Bruno -- and, in fact, Bruno tells Robert that his grandmother was Jewish.) The pleasures in “Il Sorpasso” are intrinsic to the genre of the road picture -- there is a sense of freedom and the camera explores the vivid landscapes with as much enthusiasm as the travelers newly visiting these places. Everyone is doing the twist or listening to the same saccharine pop music -- a tune about a lover “with flippers, and mask, and speargun”. The women are all beautiful and vivacious and, apparently, available -- or, at least, our heroes can imagine them to be available. Sometimes, Risi slows the action and simply scans the crowd for interesting faces and figures -- there is a pretty and pert blonde cha-cha-chaing on the beach in a cast, another elegant-looking woman walking an aristocratic poodle (we later see her bathing the poodle in the sea); when the men stop at a roadside “trattoria”, the fat woman proprietor, with her breasts mostly exposed, curses them while eating pasta from a big bowl, crying out “don’t we ever get a holiday?” Her words are bitter but she’s laughing because she’s surrounded by her children, who are also fat, and it’s a fine day and the seashore is nearby. Confidences that Robert shares with Bruno reluctantly are later retailed to complete strangers. All of this is too Robert’s dismay and he keeps comically attempting to escape from Bruno only to find himself always reunited with the older man -- these scenes provide us with a tour of bus-stops and deserted train stations late at night, places you might meet a girl and flirt with her even, before her boyfriend arrives and off-camera calls her to his car. A truck crashes and Bruno. whose occupation seems to be everything and nothing, tries to buy the slightly damaged refrigerators strewn around the wreck from the stunned driver. The man shrugs at Bruno with disbelief and, then, the camera tracks slightly to the side and we see a corpse covered with a sheet lying on the pavement. Bruno isn’t non-plussed. He’s still willing to take the damaged merchandise off the truckdriver’s hands. Life is immense and the road can lead you anywhere at all and velocity is a gift of the gods -- we roar forward away from the disappointments of our past, ignoring the corpses strewn along the way, into the unknown and radiant future. This is a wonderful film, unassuming, but filled with a kind of gay wisdom.