Looking again to Italian cinema in the 1960s, I wanted to look at a debut feature from a woman filmmaker, in this case Lina Wertmüller, best known for Swept Away and Seven Beauties.
Italy really is a very different place to live than anywhere I’ve grown up. Those open streets, people’s lives always on show, the lads we see traipsing up and down the street, watching the women, commenting on these slow small town lives that presumably give the film its title. Lina Wertmüller takes a leaf from Fellini (who had his own film about aimless lads ten years earlier, I vitelloni), but gives it her own sense of life lived aimlessly. It looks beautiful, carefully restored in 2020, every bit the equal of other Italian films of the post-war period in its monochrome cinematography. Just trying to keep the cast of characters and their interests straight in my mind, though, means it would probably benefit from a re-watch (there seem to be a number of these young men, three to five of them, whom I found rather hard to tell apart). The film comments on politics and community but from the perspective of people who don’t really seem to have much to do or much in the way of prospects (aside from the one of them who’s gone to Rome to study, and a lady pharmacist who’s already doing better than any of them), though that in itself says plenty about the place and time it’s made.
CREDITS
Director/Writer Lina Wertmüller; Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo; Starring Antonio Petruzzi, Stefano Satta Flores, Sergio Ferranino, Rosana Santoro; Length 82 minutes. Seen at my mother’s home (Mubi streaming), Wellington, Monday 18 January 2021. 
filmcentric 