La vita agra (Italy, 1964, 100′)

Saturday, October 5, at 10 am, Cinema Centrale Arthouse

Method of access: free entry.

Director: Carlo Lizzani
Script: Tratto dall’omonimo romanzo di Luciano Bianciardi
Screenplay: Carlo Lizzani, Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Amidei
Photography: Erico Menczer
Editing: Franco Fraticelli
Music: Piero Piccioni
Cast: Ugo Tognazzi, Giovanna Ralli, Giampiero Albertini, Enzo Jannacci
Production: E. Nino Krisman per Film Napoleon

Luciano Bianchi lives with his wife and son in Guastalla, in the Bassa Reggiana (in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna). He is a left-wing intellectual and cultural initiatives manager at a mine from which he is fired the same when it explodes causing the death of 43 workers. After having decided to want revenge; he moves to Milan to carry out an attack on the company headquarters. However, he gets into the editorial and commercial world so much so that his new well-off lifestyle leads him to forget about his initial ideas and to fit into consumerism.
Based on the cult novel of the same name (1962) by Luciano Bianciardi, it will be directed by Carlo Lizzani two years later. La vita agra has a place in the genre of bitter satiric comedies with which it can describe the Italian society of the 60s and the contradictions that arose from the well-being of the economic boom. A changing society well-represented by a chaotic and modern city like Milan. A city in which the protagonist (an unforgettable Ugo Tognazzi) will have to do some soul-searching and question his own previous expectations. In a typical Italian trattoria, there is a storyteller played by Enzo Jannacci.
Presenting the film are Gaetano Renda (Cinema Centrale Arthouse) and Gabriele Rigola (film historian, University of Genoa).

Carlo Lizzani  (Rome, Italy, 1922 – Rome, Italy, 2013) was a director, essayist and screenwriter. He took his first steps in cinema as a critic, working on the editorial staff of magazines such as ?Cinema? and ‘Bianco e Nero’. Thanks to Aldo Vergano and Giuseppe De Santis he became the screenwriter for Il sole sorge ancora (1946), Caccia tragica (1947), Riso amaro (1949) – which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay – and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (1950). Lizzani won the Best Original Screenplay Award at the Locarno Festival for Germania anno zero (1948) by Roberto Rossellini. He then decided to go behind the camera, signing his first feature, the documentary Viaggio al Sud (1949), while in 1951 he debuted with his first fiction film Achtung! Bandits! In 1953, he made Cronache di poveri amanti and Ai margini della metropoli and was involved in Cesare Zavattini’s project Amore in città . He won the David di Donatello for best director and the Nastro d’Argento for best screenplay for Banditi a Milano (1968), collaborated on the ensemble film Amore e rabbia (1969), and in 1974 made Mussolini ultimo atto directing Rod Steiger and Henry Fonda. His uncompromising and committed cinema deals with the most diverse themes, as in Mamma Ebe (1985), about the sensational case of a Roman holy woman; Cattiva (1991), about a clinical case faced and solved by the young Jung; Celluloide (1996), which recounts the difficult genesis of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta , but also La passione di Angela (2005), and Hotel Meina (2007). Not to mention the documentaries dedicated to the great masters of Italian cinema such as Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Giuseppe De Santis.

Filmography (selected): Achtung! Banditi! (1951), Cronache di poveri amanti (1954), Lo svitato (1956), Esterina (1959), L’oro di Roma (1961), Il processo di Verona (1963), La vita agra (1964), Amori pericolosi, episodio La ronda (1964), La Celestina P… R... (1965), La guerra segreta (1965), Svegliati e uccidi (1966), Un fiume di dollari (1966), Banditi a Milano (1968), L’amante di Gramigna (1968), Amore e rabbia, episodio L’indifferenza (1969), Roma bene (1971), Torino nera (1972), Mussolini ultimo atto (1974), Storie di vita e malavita (1975), San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile (1976), Fontamara (1980), La casa del tappeto giallo (1983), Mamma Ebe (1985), Cattiva (1991), Celluloide (1996), Hotel Meina (2007).