Ettore Scola obituary

Ettore Scola, who has died aged 84, was the last in the direct line of great Italian film directors who descended from the neo-realists of the 1940s. “The inequalities and corruption of Italian society have always been a rich source of inspiration for my cinema, which I inherited from the neo-realists,” remarked Scola, who generally used satire and farce to pour scorn on the Italian social-democratic regimes from the 1960s onwards. Many of his “Italian style” films, the majority of which had ambivalent main characters played by Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, take place against a background of historic events.

Typical was Scola’s first international success, We All Loved Each Other So Much (C’eravamo Tanto Amati, 1975), in which three men from different backgrounds have been bound by their friendship for 30 years since they met as partisans in the second world war. The lives of Antonio (Manfredi), a good-natured, politically active proletarian; Gianni (Gassman), a bourgeois opportunist, and Nicola (Stefano Flores), a radical intellectual film buff, are paralleled by the events and the history of Italian cinema over the years. In this moving and amusing humanistic study of friendship, there are extracts from films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica (to whom the film is dedicated).

Scola, whose parents were actors, was born in Trevico in the southern province of Campania. He studied law in Rome, but was more interested in drawing satirical cartoons. After dropping out of university, he joined the humorous magazine Marc’ Aurelio as a cartoonist, and there he got to know Fellini, who was on the editorial board. This connection helped Scola enter the film business as a writer of dozens of screenplays for broad Italian comedies from 1952 to 1964. Scola’s best scripts were for Dino Risi, whose comic style he assimilated as director.

Let’s Talk About Women (Se Permettete Parliamo Di Donne, 1964), his first film as director, was a series of sketches (a form fashionable in Italy at the time) featuring the versatile Gassman in nine different roles. In Jealousy Italian Style, aka The Pizza Triangle (Dramma della Gelosia, 1970), Mastroianni, as a young communist bricklayer, leaves his wife for Monica Vitti. All is bliss until she falls for his waiter friend, played by Giancarlo Giannini. In this contribution to that Italian genre which uses dark, melodramatic plots to create comedy, Scola manages to achieve delightful moments of political and social satire.

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After the triumph of the sensitive We All Loved Each Other So Much, whose theme, expressed by one of the characters was “We thought we’d change the world, instead the world has changed us”, Scola entered the realm of grotesque comedy with Down and Dirty aka Ugly, Dirty and Mean (Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi, 1976). It focuses on a large family, headed by the ageing one-eyed Giacinto (Manfredi), living in squalor in one rat-infested room in a shanty town on the outskirts of Rome. Scola treats his poverty-stricken characters far less kindly than the directors of the Italian neo-realist movement, who saw the poor as innocent victims of a brutal system. No less critical of a system that breeds poverty, Scola shows its degrading effects in graphic, scatological detail, yet keeping an ironic distance. “Grotesque humour is a noble and tragic way of representing contemporary problems,” Scola claimed.

In contrast, A Special Day (Una Giornata Particolare, 1977) told of two lonely residents of a seedy apartment building who are drawn together on the day in 1938 when the populace in the streets is cheering Hitler’s visit to Mussolini in Rome. Most of the appeal of this Oscar-nominated downbeat drama is the casting against type of Sophia Loren as a frumpish housewife, and Mastroianni as a depressed gay man. The film stresses how repression can be a common bond between two very different people.

Passion of Love (Passione d’Amore, 1981), set in 1862, had an army captain (Bernard Giraudeau) transferred to a frontier post, where he meets a neurotic woman (Valeria D’Obici). To his horror, she conceives a hopeless passion for him, thus drawing him into a fatal web of pity and obligation. The film was the basis of the 1994 Stephen Sondheim musical Passion.

This was followed by another successful period piece, That Night in Varennes (La Nuit de Varennes, 1982). During 1791, the French king and queen flee across the country in a coach that is finally captured by the people of Varennes. Observing them is a collection of people who include Casanova (Mastroianni), well past his prime, and the American revolutionary Tom Paine (Harvey Keitel). The group spends the journey engaged in philosophical discussion and commentary on life, love, politics and history – which is about to sweep several of them away in the revolution. The handsome film, glitteringly cast, is mounted in the style of an ambitious pageant and directed with finesse. One nice touch is that all that is seen of the ill-fated Louis and Marie Antoinette are their lower legs and feet.

Le Bal (1984), which gained another Oscar nomination, followed events in France from 1936 to the present day as reflected inside a ballroom by the changing music and the characters who frequented the place over the years. Behind the decor and the caricature performances, one senses the pain of real events, underlined by the music. Films speak in many ways: Le Bal manages to say a lot without a single line of dialogue.

Another Oscar-nominated film, The Family (La Famiglia, 1987), was a portrait of a bourgeois Italian family seen through the eyes of an old retired professor, over a period of 80 years, all the action of which takes place in the same apartment.

Scola retired in 2003, stating that while Silvio Berlusconi was in power every film made in Italy was touched by some of his money. However, in 2013, he made How Strange to be Named Federico (Che Strano Chiamarsi Federico), an affectionate semi-documentary on his friend Fellini.

He is survived by his wife Gigliola, and his daughters Silvia and Paola, both writers.