‘A Special Day’ Review.
So it’s May 6th, 1938 and Adolf is visiting his good mate Mussolini (“Hey Benny! What’s the fascist haps?”) and like the good friend that he is Benny has made sure that this will be a special day for the Fuhrer so all of Rome is out for the specially prepared celebrations…
… well, almost everyone.
Antonietta, (Sophia Loren) an over-worked housewife who is married to a lout of a husband who is faithful to the party but not to her, and mother to six children won’t be attending the festivities essentially because she is an over-worked housewife and mother to six children, so while her family are all at the parade like good fascists so she stays at home in the now empty apartment building. Although not quite empty as there is Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), a radio announcer who has been fired from his job and is considering a rather extreme and permanent solution to his problems.
After Antonietta’s mynah bird escapes its cage and lands outside Gabriele’s window these two lonely people, both excluded from everything going on, meet and find themselves spending the day together. Antonietta snaps Gabriele out of his depression while Gabriele is everything her husband is not — charming, cultured, sensitive and caring. As they bond Antonietta discovers that Gabriele was fired from the radio for being homosexual. Not only that but he is an anti-fascist. It is hard to figure out which Antonietta is more disappointed by (Antonietta follows the party line and does what she’s told because, well, why shouldn’t she and boy, could she do with some TLC, even for an afternoon). Gabriele has brought some much needed colour into her life questioning her devotion to her husband but it has also got her questioning her slavish devotion to fascism. Both, it seems, she has been following with no authentic agency of her own.
So on this special day two people connect for the briefest of moments, but everything has changed even if, as the distant sound of propaganda announcements and the Horst-Wessel play out, whatever they would ultimately love to find in each other is impossible. That also makes what they do find in each other even more important.
‘A Special Day’ (1977) is great for many reasons. Firstly, it is technically impressive to look at with the apartment complex set (filmed in an almost colour-free, sepia-tone) giving the film a similarly confined feel to Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ (1954) with the only signs of the celebrations occurring being the near-constant noise of military and social might encroaching and seeping through into these lives.
What also makes ‘A Special Day’ work is how it goes in directions you don’t quite expect with some extremely powerful moments of heart-felt emotion that seem to be saying quite a few things at once. And, despite the obvious differences between Antonietta and Gabriele, the dance these two perform around each other is always full of surprises and captivating to watch. This is also helped by the fact that Loren and Mastroianni were one of the greatest screen couples in cinema and the way these two play off each other with so little effort and with such understated tenderness is impossible not to be moved by: the scene where Gabriele makes eggs while Antonietta watches him shows how little these two need to do in each other’s company for it to work beautifully.
The film also doesn’t hold back on criticising the Italian people and society at the time for being so ignorant and stupid to fall for such an ideology with Loren’s character and her family really coming in for the brunt of these attacks. The entire film seems to be saying “What the hell were we thinking?!” and rightly so. Yet even though the movie has an uncomfortable sting in its tale there is a glimmer of hope… because something has changed and that in and of itself might be enough.
‘A Special Day’ is touching, moving and very bittersweet and another great film in the near perfect Loren/Mastroianni catalogue.
