Ettore Scola
Italian film director who addressed such issues as divorce and religion through satire and farce
ETTORE SCOLA, who has died aged 84, was an Italian film director and screenwriter who won international acclaim with humorous and satirical films that explored life and love in post-Mussolini Italy.
“A film is a tale, an irreplaceable means of communication,” Scola observed. “It corresponds to the written page but has a language which is accessible to everyone.” His speciality was a form of social comedy often described as Commedia
all’italiana (“Comedy in the Italian way”), in which subjects such as marriage, religion, contraception and divorce were addressed through the prism of satire and farce.
It was a format that he revised and reworked in films such as Il Sorpasso (1962), Una Giornata Particolare (1977), Le Bal (1983), Macaroni (1985) and The Dinner (1998), collaborating with many of the leading Italian actors of the period, including Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, along with international stars such as Jack Lemmon and Fanny Ardant. One of his early successes was
C’eravamo tanto amati, (1974, “We All Loved Each Other So Much”) consisting of interlinked stories, starring Nino Manfredi and Satefania Sandrelli, which chronicled a series of romantic pratfalls in Rome during the 1960s. For one sequence Scola recreated the Trevi Fountain scene from La Dolce Vita. The American critic Leonard Maltin described the film as “a loving homage to Fellini, De Sica and post-war Italian cinema”.
Two years later he won the best director award at Cannes for Brutti,
sporchi e cattivi (“Ugly, Dirty and Bad”). Perhaps his best known film outside Italy, however, was Una Giornata
Particolare (“A Special Day”), which he both directed and co-wrote. Set on the day in May 1938 when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Rome, the film focused on a housewife (Sophia Loren) and her neighbour (Marcello Mastroianni), a homosexual and antifascist who is waiting to be deported to Sardinia. It won the Golden Globe for best foreign film and two Oscar nominations (including one for Mastroianni).
Away from the camera Scola was politically active. A member of the Italian Communist Party for many years, in the late 1980s he was the culture minister in their shadow cabinet. In later life Scola railed against Silvio Berlusconi’s influence on film production.
Ettore Scola was born on May 10 1931 at Trevico in the Campania region of southern Italy, which he recalled as “a small mountainous village with 600 inhabitants, where every year a lorry brought cinema.”
On his first visit to the village square where films were shown, he recalled, he was four years old and there was such a strong wind “the screen at the centre of the village was shattered like a sail”. None the less he watched Laurel and Hardy shorts with reverence, considering the spectacle a sacred event (“Laughing would have sounded like mockery”).
Scola grew up in the shadow of fascism: “Back then, cultural life was very poor, the radio was that of the regime, it was forbidden to freely manifest one’s own ideas.” He moved to Rome after the war, where he enrolled at the University of Rome, initially to study Medicine before switching to Law.
His talent as a comic writer was soon apparent. As a young man he ghostwrote material for Toto, Italy’s biggest comic actor, and contributed to the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio. He spent the 1950s delivering scripts for production companies, working on eight films in 1954 alone. He made his directorial debut in 1964 with Let’s
Talk About Women, in which Vittorio Gassman played different characters in nine separate stories.
Scola’s best known work dealt with the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, although he sometimes explored other themes. In Le Bal he created a dialogue-free story about a French ballroom and he ventured into English-language material with
Macaroni, in which Jack Lemmon plays an uptight American businessman learning how to embrace the good life while in Naples. His other films included Passion of
Love (1981), That Night in Varennes (1982, set during the French Revolution) and The Family (1987) which was also nominated for an Oscar. He retired in 2011, saying that he “didn’t want to become one of those old ladies who wear high heels and lipstick just to keep youthful company”.
He is survived by his wife, Gigliola, and two daughters.