La Vita Agra by Carlo Lizzani

Luciano Bianchi (Ugo Toniazzi) is “cultural manager” of a failing mining company. He ends up fired after some miners die in an accident. Jobless, Luciano goes to Milano with the sole plan of blowing up the headquarters of the mining company with dynamite. Once in the city, he takes a job as a copywriter and hooks up with a leftist journalist, Anna.

Keep in mind that this is a comedy inspired by a famous novel of the 1960s, written by Luciano Bianciardi (is the name similarity between the writer and the protagonist accidental?) The movie is actually a poignant satire of many factors of great interest in Italy at that time. The newly developed bourgeois groups that were superficially interested in philosophy or politics are cynically shown in all their insincerity; advertising and the dawn of sexually-saturated commercials are also stripped of their presumed air of novelty. In director Carlo Lizzani’s perspective, Italian society is a place of anonymous, merely functional human contacts, and capitalist, fast-paced lifestyles. The film also captures the rise of numerous media, casting a warning over their haphazard growth. A very good point of Lizzani’s movie is the overwhelming humour which arises from the absurd scenery of Milano and its inhabitants, strongly resembling a Tom Stoppard play, for example.

This movie fits in pretty well with the general theme of AIFF, as it underlines how the political awareness of the luxury-starved bourgeois became secondary, in the favour of entertainment. The primary ‘victim’ of this shift of values is the (anti)hero himself. Luciano gradually lets his main goals become ghosts and allows himself to be grabbed by the commodities of the fast-growing supercity of Milano. No wonder Anna, Lizzani’s vivacious and civically/politically conscious insider in Luciano’s life, eventually leaves him. The moral failure of Luciano is the victory of the new Milano and its pale inhabitants.

Mark Racz