In the morning, a married couple with three children wish each other a good day. At the office, the husband is having an affair with his secretary; the wife, after sending the children off with an au pair, welcomes a lover into the home. That evening, the family is back together, in front of the television. Once again, Cesare Zavattini came up with the original idea for the film, which constitutes one of the episodes in a project entitled Le italiane e l’amore, inspired by a famous collection of female confessions curated by Gabriella Parca. However, as the episode uses parallel editing to follow the couple’s day, it hastily avoids any anti-bourgeois sentiments or sexual allusions. The two carefree protagonists, surrounded by objects (books such as the Kinsey Reports, and obviously food: spaghetti), appear as a cynical, desolate parody of the incommunicability and crisis that permeates Antonioni’s couples, with the addition of the anarchist intrusion of some typically obnoxious Ferrerian children and small, almost surreal moments, such as the appearance of a trumpet player.

Emiliano Morreale

Ferreri’s cinema often obsessively concentrates on a single isolated element, leading to extreme consequences, and therefore the short film provides a suitable medium for his style. In a period when anthology comedy films were at their peak, indeed almost dominant, Ferreri turned the genre on its head with Il professore, and the result is one of his greatest achievements. In this film, a middle-aged school teacher installs a toilet in his classroom in order to better supervise his female students, causing himself great inner turmoil. The work brings together many elements which are alluded to without ever being overly exploited. The teacher is nostalgic for the fascist regime; the students, who are not particularly beautiful and wear identical uniforms, represent a contradictory element, more linked to social order and history than eroticism. The Italian institution is still permeated by its fascist heritage; however, the protagonist, rather than being an arrogant monster, is himself a victim, a relic forgotten by time. The structure of this short film may appear simple, but is in fact masterful, with long empty scenes dominated by objects: here, Antonioni’s alienation becomes fetishism and the tragic turnes into grotesque, but the smile on the viewer’s lips remains frozen.

Emiliano Morreale

After Le italiane e l’amore and Controsesso, Ferreri continued his voyage as an interloper in the anthology comedy genre with a film directed entirely by him. It stars Ugo Tognazzi, who was one of the top names in Italian comedy at the time. The film tells four stories about marriage: two couples who arrange a ‘wedding’ for their dogs; a husband dealing with his wife’s lack of sexual desire one evening in bed; a couple in America who take part in a group therapy session in order to salvage their sex life; in the near future (1984, of course) human beings marry plastic dolls created for that purpose, and have plastic children.
Ferreri seems to suggest that there’s no escape from the squalor of married life. The wretchedness of men is reflected in female characters portrayed with more than a touch of misogyny – in such an inhuman world, women can’t even aspire to the role of victims, ending up as mere accomplices, albeit sometimes formidable ones. Nothing escapes the film’s mirthless ridicule: not the new bourgeoisie breaking away from mores, nor the church’s attempts to modernise. The hollowness of the institution of marriage is laid bare by brutal comparison with its root, and perhaps its antithesis: sex. In the first episode, the most anecdotal, the opening scene is immersed in a vision of normality that is almost a case study. The storytelling is completely straightforward – Ferreri does not underline, he shows no surprise. The second episode, depicting a couple going to bed, hardly even contains a story, but rather it is a report without a climax. In the last episode, science fiction is used simply to project the consequences of the weariness shown in the preceding episodes. The scene is overly expository, but it is the germ of the apocalyptic and anti-utopistic Ferreri that shines in his later films, from La cagna and Il seme dell’uomo onwards. The use of sets, whether archaeological or futuristic, also foreshadows the next phase of the director’s work.

Emiliano Morreale