‘My Friends’ or — Men Behaving Badly?
Four middle-aged friends — Perozzi (Philippe Noiret), Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi), Melandri (Gastone Moschin) and Necchi (Duilio Del Prete) — are profoundly bored and fed-up with their lives, their families and their society. To alleviate this unshakable ennui they sporadically embark on what they call zingarate, or “gypsy shenanigans”, which consists of playing practical jokes on unwitting members of the public, typically highly mean-spirited in nature.
And that’s pretty much about it as Mario Monicelli’s ‘My Friends’ (1975), or ‘Amici Miei’, is driven less by a plot-heavy narrative and more by a series of colourful escapades shuffled about in time that allow us to witness not only the various adventures of this bunch of aging bozos desperately attempting to cling onto their youth but also offering us a glimpse into their lives, problems and backgrounds.
What’s surprising, yet also very telling, is that all of them are either middle-class professionals (Noiret is a journalist whilst Moschin is an architect) or, in the case of Tognazzi’s Mascetti, an impoverished Count so the cause of their self-absorbed anguish isn’t so much financial, social or status related but, seemingly, existential in nature. “What is the point of ANY of this?” they appear to be asking. It’s an important question even if their response is irresponsibly adolescent.
Along the way they pick up another willing addition to their group, Professor Sassaroli (Adolfo Celi), a successful surgeon who becomes attracted to the gang’s adolescent antics after Melandri successfully seduces his wife away from him, something Sassaroli is somewhat relieved to have happen because it transpires his wife is certifiably insane. This terrible revelation leads to the group cheering Melandri’s spirits up in the film’s most famous scene where the gang stand on a train station platform and, as the departing passengers lean out the windows to wave goodbye, slap them all on the face.
The film was an enormous success in Italy, so much so it even beat ‘Jaws’ (1975) at the Italian box office. It didn’t have quite the same success internationally and although part of this can certainly be explained by its use of fast-talking, nonsensical Italian (Tognazzi spouts an almost endless cascade of “supercazzolas”, an invented word which roughly translates as “super asshole”) I suspect it could also be partly down to the humour which can be extraordinarily malicious, cynical and nasty, even for a Monicelli commedia all’italiana. Still, the excellent cast is superb so, despite their despicable antics, we never quite detest them too much.
The film deliberately ends on the blackest note possible although one that, ironically, almost (and I must stress the use of the word ‘almost’) justifies their behaviour because it explicitly highlights their central concern — what DOES this (life) all mean? The answer is, ultimately, nothing but if that depresses you to the point of acting like a supercazzola then don’t be surprised if it bites you on the ass and everybody laughs.
