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“Marcello spends hours discussing his role until he thoroughly understands it, extracting the most extraordinary nuances. When he has it inside him, and he trusts his director, we can get what we’re really after: a look at the inner reality of life.” —Federico Fellini
“The most complete of movie actors, his face never seeming composed for the screen but acting simply as a window for his words.” —Roger Ebert
New York, NY (April 17, 2017) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Istituto Luce Cinecittà announce Il Bello Marcello, a 28-film retrospective honoring one of the 20th century’s greatest movie stars, Marcello Mastroianni, May 17-31.
The Latin lover, the quintessential continental, the world weary Don Giovanni: for over five decades Marcello Mastroianni epitomized and complicated onscreen masculinity, and remains a key symbol of postwar Italian cinema. Propelled to worldwide stardom with his star turn in Fellini’s La Dolce vita, Mastroianni allured audiences with the diverse roles he embodied throughout his career―an impotent ladies’ man in Il bell' Antonio, a scheming cuckold in Divorce Italian Style, a gay man living in Mussolini’s Italy in A Special Day. Mastroianni’s magnetism made him a Fellini regular, but he also gave singular performances for international auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Marco Bellocchio, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Jacques Demy, Raúl Ruiz, and Robert Altman.
Among the highlights in the series are rare screenings of Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio and Visconti’s Camus adaptation The Stranger, as well as new restorations of such late-career films as Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death and Nikita Mikhalkov’s Dark Eyes, for which the actor earned his final Oscar nomination.
Organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan, and by Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Co-produced by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Rome. Presented in association with the Ministry of Culture of Italy.
Tickets for Il Bello Marcello and Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (to be announced shortly) go on sale May 4, with Film Society members receiving an early access period beginning May 2. Tickets are $14; $11 for students and seniors (62+); and $9 for Film Society members. See more and save with the 3+ film discount package or $125 Il Bello Marcello All Access Pass. Learn more at filmlinc.org.
Acknowledgments:
Istituto Luce Cinecittà; Le Petit Bureau; Ministry of Culture of Italy; UCLA Film & Television Archive
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise noted.
8 ½
Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963, 35mm, 138m
Italian, French, English and German with English subtitles
In Federico Fellini’s monumental landmark of Italian cinema, Mastroianni anchors an irresistible mélange of behind-the-scenes farce, marital tragicomedy, surrealist theological vignettes, poeticized flashbacks, and elaborate projections of private fantasies. Mastroianni plays hotshot filmmaker Guido Anselmi, struggling to get his latest passion project off the ground, while juggling relationships with various women. Notable for its bracing formal modernism and wry self-awareness, 8½ is at its heart a compassionate tribute to the wrenching aches and pains, and ephemeral ecstasies, of the creative process. The film features archetypal yet emotionally precise performances by Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale, as his wife, his mistress, and his idealized muse, alongside the colorful supporting roster of producers, journalists, movie stars, and clergy who swarm around Guido as he struggles to actualize his ambitious magnum opus.
Saturday, May 20, 6:45pm
Saturday, May 27, 4:00pm
Fellini, 8 ½ in Color will be on view in the Walter Reade Theater’s Furman Gallery throughout the festival, displaying newly discovered color photos from behind the scenes of the black-and-white masterpiece, shot by the late Paul Ronald and accompanied by recollections from the film’s co-star Anouk Aimée.
Allonsanfàn
Paolo Taviani & Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 1974, 35mm, 111m
Italian with English subtitles
In this dreamlike, 19th-century-set period piece, Mastroianni stars as Fulvio, an aging political revolutionary of noble birth who begins questioning his commitment to the cause. While he secretly desires to return to his place among the aristocracy, Fulvio’s cowardice keeps him from renouncing his anarchist comrades—a situation that sets into motion a series of increasingly dangerous lies and betrayals. Mastroianni handles this complex, antihero role with superb understatement, while the Taviani brothers punctuate the proceedings with hallucinatory, often musical interludes. It all comes wrapped in a painterly visual style and with a typically inspired Ennio Morricone score. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Thursday, May 18, 4:30pm
Wednesday, May 24, 9:15pm
The Beekeeper / O melissokomos
Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy, 1986, 35mm, 122m
Greek and French with English subtitles
Mastroianni sheds all traces of movie-star glamour in one of his most intense, wrenching performances. He plays taciturn, stone-faced beekeeper Spryos, who, following the wedding of his daughter, makes an annual journey from the north of Greece to the south, traveling along with his hives. En route, he meets an erratic, young female drifter, with whom he strikes up an unusual, self-destructive relationship. The second film in Theo Angelopoulos’s “trilogy of silence” is a spare, haunting road movie in which moments of quiet contemplation are shattered by startling bursts of savagery.
Friday, May 26, 2:00pm
Tuesday, May 30, 9:00pm
Il bell'Antonio
Mauro Bolognini, Italy/France, 1960, 35mm, 105m
Italian with English subtitles
Mastroianni daringly subverts his suave, Euro-lover image in this caustic, black-comic critique of church, state, and masculinity. He stars as a handsome, seemingly irresistible ladies’ man, who, behind his carefully cultivated playboy image, is concealing a secret shame: he is, in fact, impotent. When word of his condition gets out, it sends everyone around him—including his parents, in-laws, priest, and new wife (Claudia Cardinale)—into an existential panic. Scripted by arch iconoclast Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il bell’Antonio plays on the knife’s edge of satire and florid melodrama—all leading to a profoundly ironic ending worthy of Sirk. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Sunday, May 21, 4:30pm
Tuesday, May 30, 2:00pm
Big Deal on Madonna Street / I soliti ignoti
Mario Monicelli, 1958, Italy, 35mm, 106m
Italian with English subtitles
This raucously entertaining caper comedy is the original—and arguably greatest—heist spoof (like a boisterous Italian Rififi played for laughs). Mastroianni is one among a ragtag group of petty criminals—including Vittorio Gassman as a washed-up boxer and Totò as the lone professional in the group—who hatch a seemingly foolproof plan to rob a pawnshop. But the gang proves better at cracking wise than at cracking safes. From the impeccably tossed-off one-liners to the hilariously botched break-in climax, this is commedia all'italiana at its very best. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Wednesday, May 17, 9:00pm
Saturday, May 20, 1:00pm
Casanova 70
Mario Monicelli, Italy/France, 1965, 113m
Italian with English subtitles
This molto groovy, swinging ‘60s sex comedy stars Mastroianni as an inveterate seducer of women with a kinky hang-up: he can’t get it on without an element of danger. It’s a supremely silly premise that’s milked for all it’s worth, as the hapless Romeo finds himself driven to increasingly desperate extremes in order to get his jollies (situations involving, variously, a lion’s cage, a car chase with a cavalcade of Sicilians in hot pursuit, and a murder plot). In addition to a very game performance from Mastroianni, this Carlo Ponti production boasts drop-dead gorgeous Mediterranean locales, plenty of Euro-chic couture, and the de rigueur bachelor pad soundtrack. DCP from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Tuesday, May 23, 9:15pm
Wednesday, May 31, 4:30pm
City of Women / La città delle donne
Federico Fellini, Italy/France, 1980, 139m
Italian with English subtitles
Fellini’s career-long fascination with women receives one of its most thorough and unbridled treatments in this kaleidoscopic, straight-from-the-id fantasia. Mastroianni stands in for the filmmaker as Snàporaz, a lecherous womanizer transported to a through-the-looking-glass alternate universe ruled by women. There are roller-skating radical feminists, strung-out lesbian new wavers, and an ex-wife—oh my!—as Snàporaz/Fellini is forced to reckon with his own complex, often contradictory views of women. Extravagantly surreal, City of Women is a hallucinatory, circus carnival odyssey through the dream life of one of cinema’s great visionaries.
Tuesday, May 23, 1:30pm
Sunday, May 28, 3:30pm
Dark Eyes / Oci ciornie
Nikita Mikhalkov, Italy/USA/USSR, 1987, 117m
Italian, Russian, and French with English subtitles
Aboard a Mediterranean steamship around the turn of the century, Romano (Mastroianni), an aging, once wealthy Italian gentleman, relates his tale of lost love to a Russian traveler. Via nostalgia-tinged flashbacks, he tells of a brief, bittersweet affair with a fragile young Russian woman: how they met at a spa, how he pursued her to Russia, and how a knife twist of fate altered the course of his life. Weaving together multiple short stories by Chekhov (most notably “The Lady with the Dog”), this opulent, ironic romance is graced with a quintessential, Oscar-nominated Mastroianni performance—by turns elegant, impish, and melancholy. The DCP for Dark Eyes is a 4K restoration realized by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, CSC–Cineteca Nazionale and VIGGO Srl in collaboration with Rai Cinema.
Wednesday, May 24, 2:00pm
Sunday, May 28, 9:30pm
Divorce Italian Style / Divorzio all'italiana
Pietro Germi, Italy, 1961, 35mm, 105m
Italian with English subtitles
What if you lust after your pure yet sexy cousin (Stefania Sandrelli), but are thwarted by your mustachioed wife (Daniela Rocca)? If you're a Sicilian aristo, the epitome of masculinity (Mastroianni), you arrange events so you can play the murderously jealous husband. (The Italian court won’t grant a divorce, but a crime passionnel warrants a judicial wink and a nod.) An Oscar-winning script full of black hilarity, with a suitably soigné Mastroianni, sporting a perfectly groomed little mustache and sleeked-down hair, lounge-lizard style. Nominated for three Academy Awards, including best actor for Mastroianni, and winner for best foreign-language film. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Friday, May 19, 7:00pm
Sunday, May 28, 1:00pm
La Dolce vita
Federico Fellini, Italy, 1960, 35mm, 174m
Italian, English, French, and German with English subtitles
Fellini’s intoxicating portrayal of social and cultural decadence in postwar Rome is at once a lavishly picaresque romp and a jarringly wistful fable about the spiritual complications that follow from extravagant pleasure, casual vice, and proximity to fame. Mastroianni is nothing short of iconic in the role of tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini, who, in the narrative span of a week, seems to glide effortlessly from party to party, social scene to social scene, woman to woman, in and out of love, heeding the paired siren calls of professional ambition and personal indulgence. Boasting Oscar-winning costumes, a timeless score by Nino Rota, a vividly memorable cast of supporting characters, and a potent blend of comedy, tragedy, and unbridled sensuality, La Dolce vita remains a bracing, timely masterwork whose singular emotional impact is inextricably linked to the magnetism of its leading man.
Saturday, May 20, 3:15pm
Monday, May 29, 3:30pm
Family Portrait / Cronaca familiare
Valerio Zurlini, Italy, 1962, 35mm, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
Mastroianni brings a brooding intensity to this psychologically charged modernist melodrama from unsung auteur Valerio Zurlini. He plays Enrico, an impoverished journalist who, after learning of the untimely death of his younger brother Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin), reflects on their fraught relationship. Raised in separate households—Enrico by his poor grandmother, Lorenzo in the home of a wealthy nobleman—the two reunite as young men, weathering years of changing fortunes, family crises, and, finally, Lorenzo’s long illness. Bathed in a mood of magisterial melancholy, “the classiest ‘male weepie’ ever filmed” (Elliott Stein) achieves an almost transcendent poignancy thanks to Mastroianni’s masterful performance and Zurlini’s sensitively stylized direction. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Thursday, May 18, 2:00pm
Wednesday, May 24, 7:00pm
Ginger and Fred / Ginger e Fred
Federico Fellini, Italy/France/West Germany, 1986, 35mm, 125m
English and Italian with English subtitles
Fellini brings Mastroianni together with another icon of Italian cinema, Giulietta Masina, for this alternately sweet and sour spoof of televisual inanity. They play former dance partners once famous for impersonating Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She’s now an adorably sweet-hearted grandmother; he’s a disheveled, dissolute degenerate. Forty years after breaking up the act, they reunite for an elaborate Christmas TV special, envisioned by Fellini as an oddball extravaganza of fame-hungry weirdoes, deviants, and MTV wannabes. The prickly satire is balanced by the touching interplay between Mastroianni and Masina, who lend the film its human, odd-couple comedy core.
Tuesday, May 23, 4:30pm
Monday, May 29, 1:00pm
La Grande bouffe
Marco Ferreri, France/Italy, 1973, 35mm, 130m
French and Italian with English subtitles
Four tired-of-life middle-aged men—Mastroianni’s randy airplane pilot, Michel Piccoli’s gassy television producer, Philippe Noiret’s Oedipal judge, and Ugo Tognazzi’s Brando-impersonating chef—convene at an opulent Parisian villa for a gut-busting, nihilistic orgy of food and sex. Joined by three prostitutes and a kinky schoolteacher, the quartet gorge themselves silly on elaborately prepared feasts, make love anywhere and everywhere, and sometimes combine the two pursuits—all in the name of hedonistic self-destruction. Shocking, subversive, and scatological, this savage satire of bourgeois excess is the most outrageous act of gastronomic grotesquerie ever perpetrated on screen. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Friday, May 26, 7:00pm
Wednesday, May 31, 2:00pm
Henry IV
Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 1984, 35mm, 95m
Italian with English subtitles
Luigi Pirandello’s masterful hall-of-mirrors tragicomedy receives a shrewd screen adaptation, featuring Mastroianni at his dynamic best. He relishes the role of an aristocratic 20th-century madman who has lived under the decades-long delusion that he is the titular Holy Roman Emperor. When he receives a visit from a group of old acquaintances, including his former paramour (Claudia Cardinale), it disrupts his carefully cultivated fantasy. Of course, this being Pirandello, all is not as it seems… Probing themes of madness vs. sanity, truth vs. illusion, Henry IV toys brilliantly with the slippery nature of reality. The rhapsodic, tango-inflected score is courtesy of Argentine master composer Astor Piazzolla. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Friday, May 19, 4:30pm
Friday, May 26, 9:30pm
Hungry for Love / Adua e le compagne
Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960, Italy, 35mm, 106m
Italian with English subtitles
A trio of iconic European actresses—Simone Signoret, Emmanuelle Riva, and Sandra Milo—headline this potent, proto-feminist portrait of down-and-out women fighting to beat the odds in a patriarchal society. They are three fourths of a quartet of prostitutes who, after their brothel is forced to close, go into business running a countryside restaurant—but they soon find out that starting over isn’t so easy. Director Antonio Pietrangeli combines earthy humor with hard-hitting, slice-of-life social realism, while Mastroianni, in a memorable supporting role, displays his trademark charismatic insouciance as a smooth-talking car salesman. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Wednesday, May 17, 2:00pm
Tuesday, May 23, 7:00pm
Marriage Italian Style / Matrimonio all'italiana
Vittorio De Sica, Italy/France, 1964, 35mm, 102m
Italian with English subtitles
Mastroianni and Sophia Loren cemented their status as one of the all-time great screen couples in Vittorio De Sica’s classic battle-of-the-sexes farce. He’s Domenico, a suave, bourgeois business owner; she’s Filumena, a rough-around-the-edges Neapolitan prostitute. In flashback, their tempestuous 22-year relationship unfolds, right up his impending marriage to another woman—but Filumena has other plans. Loren sizzles in an Oscar-nominated performance, while nobody plays the cad better than Mastroianni. Their chemistry propels a film that begins as a near-flawless boudoir comedy, only to develop into something disarmingly moving.
Friday, May 19, 9:15pm
Friday, May 26, 4:30pm
La Notte
Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961, 121m
Italian and French with English subtitles
In this beguiling second entry in Antonioni’s celebrated trilogy that also includes L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, Mastroianni radiates brooding energy as Giovanni Pontano, a successful novelist who spends a day and a night drifting through the starkly beautiful built and natural environments, and the unsettlingly superficial social settings, of 1960s Milan. Drifting alongside him, on a path that alternately intersects with and diverges from his own, is his wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau); the fate of their imperiled marriage supplies the film’s emotional focal point. Meanwhile, husband and wife encounter tragedy and temptation in equal measure—the latter partly in the form of a watchful, seductive Monica Vitti. Shot in lusciously textured black-and-white, the film offers a melancholic, unblinking portrait of a time and a place, a social class, and a relationship.
Saturday, May 20, 9:30pm
Saturday, May 27, 9:15pm
The Organizer / I compagni
Mario Monicelli, Italy/France/Yugoslavia, 1963, 35mm, 126m
Italian with English subtitles
A bearded and bespectacled Mastroianni gives one of his finest, most sincere performances in this rousing, up-with-the-people paean to resistance. He stars as a deceptively mild-mannered professor hiding out from the law in turn-of-the-century Turin, where he becomes the rabble-rousing leader of a local textile factory strike, a tense standoff between the haves and have-nots that threatens to tear the community apart. Comedy maestro Mario Monicelli brings a dose of compassionate humor to the proceedings, resulting in an engaging, profoundly human portrait of social struggle.
Friday, May 19, 2:00pm
Thursday, May 25, 7:00pm
Ready to Wear / Prêt-à-Porter
Robert Altman, USA, 1994, 35mm, 133m
English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish with English subtitles
Robert Altman’s underrated, deliciously catty fashion industry satire zigzags, in inimitable Altman style, between the swarms of reporters, designers, models, power players, and oddballs buzzing around Paris Fashion Week. Mastroianni is the Italian-Russian tailor who’s on the run after being mistakenly accused of murdering an industry bigwig. He’s one among a sprawling cast of international luminaries that includes Sophia Loren (recreating a certain iconic striptease), Kim Basinger, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, and Forest Whitaker. With its of-the-moment fashions, zeitgeisty celebrity cameos, and soundtrack that skips from Salt-N-Pepa to Björk to The Cranberries, it plays like a Nashville for the ’90s.
Wednesday, May 31, 6:45pm
A Slightly Pregnant Man / L'événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la lune
Jacques Demy, France/Italy, 1973, 92m
French with English subtitles
Feeling out of sorts, Marco (Mastroianni), an Italian driving instructor living in Paris, pays a visit to the doctor, who promptly diagnoses him as four months pregnant. It’s the medical miracle heard ’round the world, as Marco becomes fodder for the press, a curiosity to the scientific community, and a cash cow for a maternity wear company—while leaving his hairdresser wife (Catherine Deneuve) alternately gobsmacked and delighted. Jacques Demy, directing in his très charmant candy-colored visual style, plays the patently absurd premise for both cheery comedy and slyly subversive social commentary, raising serious questions about male-female social roles and gender equality.
Saturday, May 27, 2:00pm
Wednesday, May 31, 9:30pm
A Special Day / Una giornata particolare
Ettore Scola, Italy, 1977, 35mm, 106m
Italian with English subtitles
May 8, 1938: all of Rome is turning out to see the spectacle of Hitler’s visit to Italy. Among the few not attending are a harried housewife and mother-of-six (Sophia Loren) and her across-the-way neighbor (Mastroianni, Oscar-nominated), a suicidal ex-radio announcer. She’s a conservative Mussolini supporter; he’s a homosexual enemy of the state. But after a chance meeting, the two share a life-changing day that will challenge their assumptions about people, politics, and sexuality. Gorgeously photographed in creamy sepia tones and driven by two virtuoso central performances, this tender, daring chamber drama is a more-relevant-than-ever look at fascism’s human cost.
Wednesday, May 17, 4:30pm
Saturday, May 27, 7:00pm
The Stranger / Lo straniero
Luchino Visconti, Italy/France/Algeria, 1967, 35mm, 104m
French and Italian with English subtitles
Visconti’s shattering adaptation of Albert Camus’s landmark work of existential humanism brilliantly translates the novel to the screen. Mastroianni is (perhaps unexpectedly) perfectly cast as the alienated, atheist Meursault who, due to a series of seemingly random events, shoots an Arab man on an Algerian beach and finds himself on trial for murder. The cosmic absurdity of Camus’s vision is delivered with a gut-punch by Visconti and Mastroianni in a stunning final scene that stands as one of the actor’s greatest moments. Long unavailable (and never released on DVD), The Stranger deserves to be rediscovered for its singular, haunting power. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Sunday, May 21, 7:00pm
Tuesday, May 30, 4:15pm
Sunflower / I girasoli
Vittorio De Sica, Italy/France/Soviet Union, 1970, 107m
English, Italian, and Russian with English subtitles
The third and final film that Mastroianni made with Sophia Loren under Vittorio De Sica’s direction is a sublimely stirring saga of lovers swept up in the tide of history. In the midst of World War II, Giovanna (Loren) and Antonio (Mastroianni) marry hastily just days before he’s shipped off to fight on the Russian front. After years go by without word from her husband, Giovanna travels to Moscow (where the film was shot on location) to find him, a search that culminates in an exquisitely understated, dark-and-stormy-night climax. The pervading air of romantic melancholy is borne along on the swelling strains of Henry Mancini’s Oscar-nominated score. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Sunday, May 21, 9:15pm
Wednesday, May 24, 4:30pm
That Night in Varennes / La nuit de Varennes
Ettore Scola, France/Italy, 1982, 35mm, 150m
French and Italian with English subtitles
A bevy of 18th-century notables (including ribald novelist Restif de la Bretonne, played by Jean-Louis Barrault; American rabble-rouser Thomas Paine, played by Harvey Keitel; and a haughty countess played by Hanna Schygulla) find themselves caught up in the tumult of the French Revolution as they travel along the same route as King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during their attempted escape from Paris in 1791. Stealing the show is Mastroianni’s marvelously insouciant incarnation of legendary lover Casanova, here an aging, primping rake in powdered wig and ruffles. The colorful period detail and fizzy repartee make for a witty, rambunctious work of speculative history. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Thursday, May 25, 4:00pm
Sunday, May 28, 6:30pm
Three Lives and Only One Death / Trois vies et une seule mort
Raúl Ruiz, France/Portugal, 1996, 123m
French with English subtitles
In this idiosyncratic puzzle film, Mastroianni plays three different characters, each with his own set of multiple identities: a married man who left home one morning only to spend two decades in an enchanted apartment across the street; a lecturer at the Sorbonne who abandons his post to become a beggar; a butler waiting on a young couple in a mansion they’ve mysteriously acquired. Or are they all the same man? Drawing on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Isak Dinesen, Raúl Ruiz fashioned a delightful pattern of overlapping plots—fantasies of lives left behind, people seduced and abandoned, and personas taken on. Mastroianni’s penultimate film stands as a tribute to the range and charisma of the great actor, who died the year the film premiered. New restoration!
Monday, May 29, 9:30pm
Tuesday, May 30, 6:30pm
Todo Modo
Elio Petri, Italy/France, 1976, 35mm, 125m
English, Italian, and Latin with English subtitles
While a plague-like epidemic rages outside, Italy’s political leaders and influencers convene in a brutalist bunker for a bizarre, multi-day religious ceremony presided over by Mastroianni’s creepy priest. It’s an atmosphere thick with paranoia, pent-up sexual frustration, and gnawing Catholic guilt—and then the mysterious murders begin… Elio Petri’s byzantine satire of Italian spiritual and political corruption sustains a claustrophobic air of sinister surrealism via Dante Ferretti’s uncanny art direction; eerie Ennio Morricone score; and stylized, all-stops-out performances from Mastroianni and fellow Italian cinema great Gian Maria Volontè. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Monday, May 22, 3:30pm
Thursday, May 25, 9:30pm
White Nights / Le notti bianche
Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1957, 35mm, 101m
Italian with English subtitles
Visconti’s adaptation of a Dostoevsky story (filmed many times over, including by Robert Bresson) is a ravishing romantic reverie composed in incandescent black and white. Mastroianni is the lonely flâneur who meets and falls in love with a fragile young woman (Maria Schell) amidst the fog-shrouded night world of the Tuscan canal city of Livorno. What plays out between them is a swooning dream vision of all-consuming love and loss elevated to the nigh-operatic by Visconti’s rapturously stylized direction. Memorable Mastroianni moment: the actor cutting a rug in a rock ‘n’ roll juke joint. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Wednesday, May 17, 7:00pm
Thursday, May 25, 2:00pm
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow / Ieri oggi domani
Vittorio De Sica, Italy/France, 1963, 35mm, 119m
Italian with English subtitles
Mastroianni + Loren x 3: the duo light up this breezy triptych of tales about love, sex, and class. In the first, Mastroianni is the harried husband of a sexually voracious Loren, who’s staying pregnant to stay out of prison; in the second, they’re a pair of sophisticates tooling through Milan in a Rolls-Royce; and in the third, he’s the gotta-have-it client whose trysts with her high-priced prostitute are constantly thwarted (Loren’s sultry striptease is justly famous, but Mastroianni’s wolf-howls of delight put the scene over the top). De Sica’s Oscar-winning charmer deftly combines naughty bedroom comedy with neorealist social commentary. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Sunday, May 21, 2:00pm
Monday, May 29, 7:00pm
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