The Mating Game - Avati.

The Italian Cinema that we know begins post WW2, when a few Americans like Arthur Knight started reporting back from the scene, and it breaks up into overlapping periods - the realist movies, the Festival hits (think Fellini and Antonioni), Hercules/ Django/ the Mafia, Italian comedy, joined in the seventies by Gianni Amelio, Giuseppe Tornatorre, Etore Scola, Daniele Lucchetti and Pupi Avati. These are not mutually exclusive. Marcello Mastroianni plugs in pretty well anywhere on the spectrum. There is however no room for the pop musicals. Tough luck Adriano Celantano.

I was thinking about this because Palace has started a series of one-offs at Norton Street and they aired Avati’s 2011 Il cuore grande delle ragazze / The Big Heart of Girls. Watching this again reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his work and how hard it is to come by it in sub-titled copies - and of course it’s a strain to keep focussed when you have to dust off the notes after four year gaps.

The Big Heart of Girls (a bit more effort on an English title there fellers) is pretty much unclassifyable. Titles play over the shot of the horse cart with the bride’s white veil trailing on the road behind it - nice image. It’s a nostalgia piece based on Avati’s grandmother and set in the thirties. The land is worked by share croppers under a proprietor. The film seems to have no beef with Mussolini, whose cousin visits local beauty Isabelle Adriani and whose Blackshirts figure inconclusively from time to time.

However, the contented rural setting is already accommodating bellows camera photography and early motor cars. Narrator Alexander Haber's character is seen, as a schoolboy played by Patrizio Pelizzi, teaching his older brother to read. The brother is musician Cesare Cremonini, his brief acting career peaking. We see a photo where Cremonini is surrounded by the local women he made out with. They have difficulty fitting them all in the frame.

The film’s keynote is the forgiving attitude it takes to Cremonini’s womanising. However it looks like this is going to be enough of a good thing and land owner Gianni Cavina has a proposition. He offers “The Gargoyles,” his two plain daughters living at home and derided as unshiftable now that they’ve passed thirty. He wants Cremoni to marry one. The incentive is that the groom’s family will get the security of their tied cottage for another ten years. Cremoni also has his price, a brand new Guzzi. With an eye on the clock for the one hour mandated wooing sessions, he keeps on asking “When do I get the motorcycle.”  Just as it looks settled, Cavina’s “semi virgin” second wife’s daughter (got that?) Micaela Ramazzotti comes back from the convent. Her golden curls stand out in the sea of dark hair and black shawls. Creepy middle-aged men keep on asking her if she has a fiancé. Cremoni is immediately hooked.

The sisters, rather endearingly, take it well and, after some raised voices, it’s a done deal. There are problems however. Michaela’s sex education comes from the nuns and her trousseau dressmaker, none of whom have any practical experience. Cremoni is stressed about keeping it in his pants and his family has to sell everything in sight to raise the cost of the big church wedding. Nevertheless Cavina’s Bridal motorcade sets off with him firing his rifle when passing the landmarks custom designates (front gate, highway, entrance). Unfortunately when they get to the church they booked, it’s closed with the priest in hospital with tonsilitis. This is your classic Avati scene with Cremoni chomping at the bit and half the feast his family has impoverished themselves to provide uneaten - while the blind musicians (very Shimazu) are fed in the loo where they can’t see their surroundings and they won’t put off the guests.

Avati

However there is a last act to come, with the Duce’s cousin’s squeeze showing up at the so nice honeymoon Hotel Termine, which offers the newlyweds the suite where a famous pederast died and sends Ramazotti fleeing South to her aunt in Bari, where she lays out her (sort of) husband’s name on the beach in sea shells, until an ending which should be gross but is rather winning. We find our perception at odds with Haber’s dismissive recollection. This is Avati's act - turning round our pre-existing attitudes. I don't think it would fly today.

The film’s notion that sex is grotesque can be found in the Italian Comedy entries of Pietro Germi and Lina Wertmuller but Avati’s sympathy with his characters makes his work unique. I’m always amazed that he doesn’t occupy one of the spaces reserved for the Viscontis and Almodovars.

Cremoni gets by but he was smart not to give up his day job. Ramazotti, married to Paolo Virzi, was beginning her career as an object of desire in Italian film, notably in Daniele Luchetti’s 2013 Anni felici. Among the mainly unfamiliar faces, spot former glamor stars Erica Blanc and Sydne Rome. The colour on the copy viewed was a bit dupey but there were good English subtitles.

Barrie Pattison 2023