TIFF cinema takes a Roman holiday
If la dolce vita is out of reach this summer, try these films
TIFF Bell Lightbox is celebrating Italian cinema this summer with a series of classic films by leading directors from the 1940s to the 1970s.
“Summer in Italy,” which runs to Sept. 5, will include Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita ( 1960), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Luchino Visconti’s Sandra (1965), each playing once during the program.
It includes a retrospective on Vittorio De Sica, director of Bicycle Thieves (1948), the desperate story of a father, his son and a stolen bicycle in post-Second World War Italy whose style is widely regarded as representative of Italian cinema of that era. TIFF will show that film and other restored classics, including Marriage Italian Style (1964), Umberto D. (1952), Two Women (1960) and The Condemned of Altona (1962).
Several global Italian movie stars emerged from this time period, including power couple Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
Other heavyweights to watch for, says James Quandt, senior programmer of TIFF Cinematheque, are Claudia Cardinale, “unbelievably febrile and sensuous in Sandra,” and actor Toto.
“He is such a saint and icon in his home city that you will see his image, sometimes alongside that of the Virgin Mary, in pizza parlours in Naples,” says Quandt.
Here are a few of Quandt’s “countless buried treasures” from Summer in Italy.
Mafioso by Alberto Lattuada A 1962 black comedy about an auto factory worker named Antonio, who takes his family to his native Sicily and is forced to face a dark part of his past. “The casual, cruelly knowing comedy with which he treats that most vexed subjects, the Mafia, shocks you into uneasy laughter in scene after scene,” says Quandt.
Il Sorpasso by Dino Risi Two men who are opposites — one an immature extrovert, the other an introvert — end up on a road trip through Italy in this 1962 film. Spoiler alert: “I love beyond all measure Il Sorpasso, which is hilarious but has one of the most shocking tragic endings of any film,” says Quandt. The Assassin by Elio Petri Antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli, played by Marcello Mastroianni in this 1961film, is investigated for murder.
“Brilliantly ambiguous in its portrait of Marcello Mastroianni as an antique dealer who may or may not have murdered his mistress,” says Quandt.
“As both character and social study it is peerless.”