“Why have children? They are no use to the family, and society doesn’t want them. I know why you have them: to photograph them, to give them a pat on the cheek, to take them for a walk, to take Super8 films of them, and compare them to other children. Like dogs.” This is one of the characters in Voltati Eugenio, perhaps the film which most clearly expresses the link between Comencini’s portrayal of children and his bitter vision of Italian society. Ten-yearold Eugenio is in a car with a friend of his parents, the foolish clown Baffo, who is supposed to take him to the airport. After a falling out, Baffo abandons him on the street and his parents go looking for him. Meanwhile, flashbacks reveal the negligence, loneliness, and abandonment that the child has always suffered. Following L’ingorgo, an apocalyptic film about humanity destroying itself, a tombstone for the commedia all’italiana underpinned by a core of humanity and compassion, here the director seems to be addressing the disaster caused by the children of 1968 now that they are parents and every impulse of the youth movement had been extinguished. The tone is not plaintive: rather it is a surreal and melancholic dance accompanied by the music of Fiorenzo Carpi (reminiscent of that of Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos, 1977). Comencini does not spare anyone, least of all the older generation, even if he understands almost everybody’s reasons (with the exception of the bourgeois, middle-aged grandparents). For him, observing children also meant exploring class relations (the rich, the former peasants, the underclass) and gender (the dynamics between couples are sharply observed). In this film, being on the side of children ultimately means also being something of an anarchist.