It is commonly said that the Italian cinema of the early 1960s began to feature more female leads because the maleheroes, “the musketeers of comedy” in Goffredo Fofi’s words – Sordi, Tognazzi, Gassman, Mastroianni – had become too costly, and their demands were often unaffordable. Whether Antonio Pietrangeli also found himself involved in this (blessed) conjuncture is difficult to say, but certainly many of his films are stories about women, announced as such right from the titles (Nata di marzo, The Girl from Parma, I Knew Her Well, Adua and Her Friends).
La visita is a day in the life of Pina, a special day that will dissolve into another unfocused memory. From Rome to her village in the northern plains comes a man, met through a personal ad; and as the hours pass, this man reveals himself to be rather vile, hypocritical, too interested in money and wine; a man with neither qualities nor excuses other than his own worn-out loneliness, his lifelong lack of true human relationships.
The film, immersed in the thick greyness of the provincial mood, resonates with the mediocre commonplaces of its time and place – the rain is annoying but good for the countryside; would you marry your daughter to a black man?; you too have the right to start a family of your own – and none of these ever elicits a smile, they just keep us trapped in a frozen discomfort. Pina endures, dignified and careful not to slip down the edge between the vegetable garden and chickens, her peasant legacy, and the neat little house left to her by her parents, where every object testifies to the tenacity of petite bourgeois ambitions. What Pietrangeli tells us in a few shining flashback images is that if Pina endures, it is because, though lost, she keeps her own memory of happiness, a love affair full of affection and carnal passion with a married truck driver.
In 1962 Elio Pagliarani had published La ragazza Carla, an experimental poetic work featuring a woman “already 30 years old and all desperate little smiles”. Nothing could better describe Pina and the actress who gives her the source of life, Sandra Milo, who with her heart-shaped mouth and that (fake) backside swollen to the point of dysmorphia, offers a most completely mastered and clear performance, the most beautiful of her acting career.

Paola Cristalli