A Special Day

Ettore Scola's 1977 A Special Day is designed like a diagram or a proof:  on the day Hitler travels to Rome to consummate the alliance between Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy, a harried housewife has a brief affair with a lonely, doomed homosexual.  As the relationship between the housewife and the gay man advances during the day, the soundtrack harasses them (and the audience) with bombastic exhortations and descriptions of the budding romance between Hitler and Mussolini.  At the end of the day, the housewife's large family returns enthusiastic about the parades, speeches, and marching armies.  Two secret police escort the homosexual into exile (or possibly worse), apparently taking him to the harbor to embark for exile in Sardinia.  Fascism, as has been often remarked, is sexually titillating -- the woman's husband vows to use the night of this special day to beget a seventh child whom he plans to name Adolfo.  Italian opera dramatizes the concerns of ordinary people by creating librettos involving gods and goddesses.  In this operatic film, Scola dramatizes his political and sexual themes by having them enacted by Marcello Mastrioanni and Sophia Loren, two deities of Italian (and at that time world) cinema.  Some critics have railed against this casting, declaring the principals too glamorous for their down-trodden characters -- but both actors are exceptionally good and, in fact, the rather schematic aspects of the narrative are immeasurably enhanced by the star-power on display.  Antonietta (the housewife) and Gabriele (the gay broadcaster) have a larger-than-life operatic dimension in this film -- and this is appropriate given the fact that Scola imagines these characters as representative, surrogates for great masses of people and broad political themes.

The film commences with newsreels showing Hitler and Mussolini's conclave.  The newsreels are tinted a brownish sepia color and the images are sped up slightly to produce the effect of a silent movie -- something occurring in the distant past.  When watching these opening scenes, one wonders how Scola will manage the transition to technicolor.  Remarkably enough, he doesn't:  the whole film is shot in a dull beige color:  you can see hints of color in flesh tones and the wan yellow of some of the lights in the apartment building where the action is staged but the only hues that are allowed to stand independent of this drab, sepia color-scheme are the Nazi flags -- the big red banners stand out against the grey-brown vistas like pools of fresh blood.  The film's camerawork, despite its monochrome, its remarkably handsome:  there are long takes, including a bravura introduction to Loren's character that tracks her around the apartment as she rouses her sleeping family, manages their preparations for the day, and provides them with breakfast and coffee.  (This sequence also serves to establish the apartment in which most of the action takes place -- in this film, the handsome apartment building with its spacious suites of rooms is as central a character as the two protagonists:  the big structure has a powerful presences with tower-like and rounded glass stairwells, an interior courtyard through which the characters can observe one another, and a roof where laundry is hung that seems to be lavishly tiled with Majorca ceramic.  The structure seems modernist -- it has a sort of Bauhaus-vibe -- but also regal with a weird little plaza at its front, sunken and shaped like a hippodrome.)

As is the case with many excellent films, it's not entirely clear what point Scola wishes to make with the conflation of the political and personal themes that drive the film.  Sophia Loren's housewife is not apolitical -- in fact, she is a rabid (if superficial) Fascist:  she keeps a scrapbook in which she saves adoring pictures of il Duce and inscribes political slogans under these images.  One of those slogans declares that women can not be geniuses and should not aspire to excellence in thought or the arts -- something that Antonietta declares that she believes.  Another motto that she has written in her book is that:  "A man must be a husband, a father, and a soldier to be a man."  Gabriele ruefully observes that this edict means that he is excluded from manliness.  (Antonietta has also used buttons to make a mosaic depicting Mussolini displayed prominently in her apartment.)  Gabriele seems apolitical -- I didn't discern any indications that he is a Communist or a member of the resistance.  Rather, he seems excluded from the political life of the community and is cast as an outsider due to his sexual orientation.  The politics of World War Two have been problematic in Italy -- the film may be implicitly anti-Fascist, but it recognizes that most of the Italian people were supporters of Mussolini and enthusiastic about the pact between Berlin and Rome.  The film suggests that sex is an apolitical force, powerful but always trumped by politics -- this is the theme of Lina Wertmueller's film Love and Anarchy that has some of the same themes as A Special Day and, in fact, employs a similar mise-en-scene (the young anarchist who has come to Rome to kill Mussolini spends his last day in a brothel where almost all the action takes place.)  In general, the film is humanist -- it steers away from the politics of Fascism and focuses instead on those people excluded from the movement:  a housewife with six children (a 7th qualifies you for a "large family bonus") is merely a machine for producing soldiers -- she has no political agency; similarly, a homosexual (compelled to pay the "Bachelor tax") is also without any meaningful identity in a nation that requires all men to be husbands, fathers, and soldiers.  The film doesn't offer any panacea -- sex changes nothing, a remark that is explicitly made by Gabriele after his brief interlude with Antonietta.  Sophia Loren disguises her famous figure in a frumpy house-coat that makes her seem pregnant or fat:  appearing without any make-up, she is still beautiful although believable in the role of the Neapolitan mama.  Mastrioanni is altogether too gorgeous for his role but, as I have earlier remarked, this is appropriate to the film's operatic nature.  (One of Scola's films, 1983's The Passion of Love, affords the basis for Sondheim's Passion; I'm surprised that A Special Day hasn't been made into a opera.)

John Vernon, an all-purpose villain, is good as Antonietta's loutish husband -- he expects her to be a faithful baby-making machine while he enjoys an affair with a local schoolteacher.  The sound track is exorbitant with Wagner and national anthems:  at the end, we hear the Horst Wessel song bellowed by a male chorus while a piano plays variations on the melody that become increasing divergent and, even, discordant with the song's main theme -- but, in the end, the piano is reined-in and wistfully doubles the song in the keyboard's upper register.  At the end of the film, Fascism has prevailed.  But, of course, we know that this will be not for long.