The Second Tragic Fantozzi

The second film of an Italian office comedy. Fantozzi is a clerk at a company. His grade is low, his desk is badly placed, and everyone makes him do what they want. The company is a hierarchy. The managers are one floor above, there are others above them, and Fantozzi stands at the bottom. From there the film consists of episodes. Each is a separate small disaster. There is a tennis match. Fantozzi is called to play with the bosses and is expected to lose. There is a billiards section. There is a film club section; the company shows the same Soviet classic every week and nobody may object. That is the film's best known part. Fantozzi finally cannot bear it, stands up and says the film is terrible; the room joins him and a brief revolt breaks out. He is made to do something as punishment. What the narrative is interested in is not comedy but submission: Fantozzi is treated badly and thanks them every time, and the film shows this not as a flaw of character but as a condition of class. His family is inside the narrative too. His wife and daughter are depicted and those sections are plainly coarse today. The language is part of the film. The character addresses himself in the third person in extremely formal terms, and the formula became an idiom in Italian. Paolo Villaggio took the character from books he had written himself and plays him in the film. This is the second film in the series and was made straight after the first. Paolo Villaggio, Anna Mazzamauro, Gigi Reder and Liù Bosisio are in the cast. Luciano Salce directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Italian-style comedy and satire about offices. Who it is not for: anyone looking with today's measures; the drawing of the women and some of the jokes have plainly aged.