A Special Day

The date is 6 May 1938. Hitler is arriving in Rome and the whole city has gone out to greet him. The film takes place that day, in an emptied apartment block. Antonietta is a housewife with six children; her husband and children have gone to the parade and she has stayed behind. Ernesto lives in the same building, a radio announcer who has been dismissed and is waiting to be deported to Sardinia, because he is gay. An escaped budgerigar brings them together, and they talk through the day. The broadcast of the ceremony is audible throughout; the film never goes to the square, but the square is always there. Ettore Scola drained the image of colour almost entirely, leaving a pale, near-sepia surface. This is the film in which Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni play the opposite of what they were known for. Loren is unmade-up, tired and barely literate; Mastroianni is outside the frame of the desirable Italian man, a broken one. An important work for anyone who likes fascism told from inside a flat rather than from the square. For a viewer who wants incident it is almost entirely a conversation between two people.