Q&A with Prof. Lorenzo Fabbri, Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota
About the film
Gianni, Nicola and Antonio become close friends in 1944 while fighting the Nazis during the Italian Resistance. After the end of the war, full of illusions, they settle down. Over a period of three decades, the movie tells the story of these three idealists and of the woman who, at some point, loves them all, chronicling joys, successes, failures, love, betrayals and, ultimately, the inevitable disillusionment of life.
Inexplicably, the film did not gain much fame at the time of its release in the U.S. and still hasn’t to this day. IFF 2024 is thrilled to offer its audience an opportunity to discover this gem and fall in love with it on its 50th anniversary.
Presented in collaboration with the Cineteca Nazionale - Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.
DIRECTOR
Ettore Scola (Treviso, 1931 – Rome, 2016) is one of the greatest writer-directors of Italian cinema. He received a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1978 for his film Una Giornata Particolare starring Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and over the course of his career was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. At age 15, he became a ghostwriter. He entered the film industry as a screenwriter in 1953 and collaborated with director Dino Risi and fellow writer Ruggero Maccari on the screenplay for Risi's signature feature, Il Sorpasso (1962). He directed his first film, Se permettete parliamo di donne, in 1964. In 1974, Scola enjoyed international success with C'eravamo tanto amati, winner of numerous awards. In 1976, he won Best Director at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival for Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi. Scola made further successful films, including Una Giornata Particolare (1977), Il Mondo Nuovo (1982), Che Ora E’? (1989) and Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (1990). He directed close to 40 films in some 40 years.
Excerpts From The New York Times Review - May 24, 1977 by Vincent Canby
"We All Loved Each Other So Much" is the forgettably awkward title of Ettore Scola's wise, reflective Italian comedy that examines 30 years of recent Italian social history in terms of the friendship of three men and the one woman each man has loved at one time or another. It's the sort of thing for which European filmmakers, especially Italian, have a special feeling, while Americans have none whatsoever, if only because American producers are made uneasy by movies that are about friendship and that attempt to cover so much time. "We All Loved Each Other So Much" (…) is full of fondness, rue, outrage and high spirits. It is also—surprising for an Italian film—packed with the kind of movie references that French filmmakers like, and it is dedicated to the late Vittorio De Sica, whose "Bicycle Thief" plays a prominent part in the picture. The three men, who have become friends as leftist partisans near the end of the Nazi occupation of Italy, are Giovanni, a lawyer (Vittorio Gassman). Antonio (Nino Manfredi), who begins his postwar career as a hospital orderly (and remains one for the rest of his life, and Nico (Stefano Satta Flores), a politically committed movie nut who doesn't hesitate to abandon his wife and child to go off to Rome after a disagreement over the merits of "The Bicycle Thief." The woman who moves in and out of their lives is Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli), an aspiring actress, the high point of whose career (and one of the high points of the film) comes when she is cast as an extra in "La Dolce Vita. (…) Also extremely good are Aldo Fabrizi, as the crooked industrialist who becomes Giovanni's father-in-law, and Giovanna Ralli as the fat, bird-brained rich girl whom Giovanni marries and transforms into a chic, bored woman who comes to identify herself—fatally—with the women in Antonioni movies. Mr. Scola employs a comic style that is effective for being loose, allowing him to introduce real people as themselves (…) to go from slapstick to satire and then to drama of genuine feelings. (…) Though the film is very funny at moments, the dominant mood is a sense of loss, but even here the film makes its point in a backhanded way. "We wanted to change the world, but the world changed us," says Antonio, the aging hospital orderly. Yet Mr. Scola recognizes this as the windy cliché of someone given to self-dramatization. After 30 years the three friends are more worn, more tired, more experienced than they were as young men, but neither the world nor time has changed them in any essential ways. That's the bitter truth."
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