The masterpiece of a mature Ettore Scola, with perhaps Loren’s greatest performance, stripped of all film-star airs and brilliantly supported by a masterful Mastroianni. During Hitler’s visit to Rome, a housewife is alone in a block of flats: she strikes up a friendship with a neighbour, a gay man waiting to be taken away for internment. In order to evoke the atmosphere of an oppressive past, the director and the cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis undertake a highly radical and visually experimental project. Scola wrote: “Right from the start, the entire setting and all items of clothing were stripped of colour. Then we shot with a special filter, and then the colours were muted again during printing. And this was not only to make the photography look more like the snippets of documentary that I had opened the film with, but also because my memories of the house in Piazza Vittorio where I lived at that time are in those tones. As I recall it, the colour of Rome in those days was a non-colour, not even grey but a bit cloudy, a bit dense, like a fog inside the rooms, which in the film was a kind of symbol – even if I’m not a huge fan of symbolism – of closure, of prison, of exclusion.” Technicolor developed a printing process – ENR – that desaturated the colours to obtain the photographic tone Ettore Scola and De Santis wanted. The process is no longer reproducible on film, and recreating it was only possible thanks to digital technology. The work of the CSC – Cineteca Nazionale was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory under the supervision of Luciano Tovoli and Ettore Scola himself. It won the Golden Lion for the best restored film as part of the Venice Classics 2014.

Emiliano Morreale