First Love

Ugo is an ageing actor who has been placed in a retirement home for actors. He does not feel he belongs there; he cannot bear the rules, the timetable or the people around him. He grows close to a very young woman he meets there, and one day he leaves with her. Outside, life is not what he remembers. Dino Risi's film is one of the later works of a master of Italian comedy, and its tone is more bitter than comic. Ugo Tognazzi and Ornella Muti take the leads. The age difference is not offered as something romantic; it stands as one form of the man's refusal to accept getting old. The scenes in the home read like cinema looking at its own past.