The Italian that didn’t exist was interpreted as French. The gentle, loyal Italian crushed by the vehemence of others, mythomania, theatricality, Italianness. Nobody was as good at being anti-Italian as Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Yes, we should talk about Amour, maybe the only film of his that says something to the living in a time that has no memory: we won’t expect the public to know the filmographies when the lira existed, come on . (For those who lived in the last century, Amour seems like the elegant version of Betty Blue, one of the cheesy reference points of any 20th-century formation).
Or maybe we should talk about One Man, One Woman, the sentimentality that everyone liked, intellectuals and housewives, the Casablanca of color cinema, the love story that wasn’t there but we all wanted.
There’s something I never understood, maybe we should mention The Conformist, but unfortunately with this film, I never realized how wonderful Sandrelli’s clothes were.
It would be pointless to ask how one survives a daughter dying like this, beaten to death by the man she is with, an ordeal unimaginable, one of those things to be ashamed of, Saying awkward sentences like “I know what I’m trying to do”: He had already given the answer, it was the title of his autobiography. In the end I chose to live.
The real truth is that Trintignant was most valuable in portraying what we are not, what we didn’t know and don’t know how we should be. Whether in masterpieces like Il sorpasso or La Terrazza, or in smaller titles that attempted to milk proven successful couples (the success, indeed), Trintignant was the villain’s meek downtrodden like no other. They were Italian characters written by Italian screenwriters and considered Italian. But they were so opposed to the Italian character that it took a foreigner to give them bodies.
The overtaking student, so shy that you needed the voiceover to get to know you: you had to hear his thoughts while he meditated to avoid the intrusiveness of Vittorio Gassman, who appeared on the street and turned to the window and finally his day (and killing him, one said, unperturbed that I’d been accused of revealing the ending of a film from sixty years ago).
He planned uprisings, Roberto, whose surname Bruno Cortona did not deign to know, which he never carried out. He was someone who studied at home in August and put himself at the mercy of someone who didn’t know what duty was, who didn’t know what reliability was, who didn’t know what superego was. From an Italian.
Could Mastroianni have done that? Perhaps of all there he was the only one who could have been thought of as mild; But the real truth is that Italian cinema at its best consisted of Italians, Sordi, Tognazzi, Gassman: perfect incarnations of mythomaniacs.
There’s a scene in Success, a short film that Risi tried to milk the Sorpasso’s success with, where Trintignant doesn’t move with the girl he likes. Gassman brings him two whores and Trintignant doesn’t even shoot with them. Of course, Deaf could have made someone he doesn’t like (what’s The Widower if not a run-through allegory of the man he doesn’t draw?), but you’d never have liked him, you’d never have loved him, he’d have that openness , not had this fragility.
This gentleness also in the anger with which she asks in The Sunday Woman Anna Carla Dosio if she and Massimo do not tire of being very intelligent (and we can glimpse an anniversary: The Turinese of Turin played them from Jacqueline Bisset, a Frenchman).
My favorite Trintignant is the one in my favorite film, in the years that ended the golden age of Italian comedy. It was 1980 and at the Terrace (it’s on RaiPlay, drop this article and check it out) everyone knew each other, they all went to the same dinner, everyone was making everyone’s life miserable.
Most smitten was Trintignant, a screenwriter whom the producer, played by Ugo Tognazzi, obsessively asked about the film he was writing, “Is it funny?”. No one who writes for a living, and no one who isn’t completely dumb either, will never again ask the question “Is that funny?” after seeing The Terrace. Listen. without feeling it as the most embarrassing of all questions.
It’s not that the Terrace lacks the tragic – there’s even an anorexic Rai official who lets himself die – or the grotesque – Tognazzi is treated like the servant’s son by his wife and tainted with a despair that sees the hair of the men of the future and paints it mercilessly – but Trintignant is something else. Trintignant – I’m going to spoil the surprise of a film from forty-two years ago – takes the electric pencil sharpener and rubs his hand, in desperation at the blank sheet, at the delivery he doesn’t respect, at the superego that fails, like this Italian is not available.
It’s the same character who said to his son in the same film, “Don’t fuck, don’t study, don’t work, that’s how much dad thinks about it: but dad is bored!”, and he replied, “Dad, I’m two years old that I work in a bank ». Because, as Gassman always said in this film, summing up those years of Italian cinema better than critics ever could: “We’re all like this now: dramatic characters who only manifest themselves comically”.
But with that fragility there, with that confusion there, with that expression of someone standing in the corner, certainly not because you notice them more, so only a foreigner on loan could do that.