‘The Second Tragic Fantozzi’ or — Slapstick Goes Meta?

You don’t need to have seen the original ‘Fantozzi’ (1975), or ‘White Collar Blues’, film (I certainly hadn’t) to have a clear idea about what’s going on as you can soon discern this franchise revolves around obsequious and bumbling office accountant, Ugo Fantozzi (Paolo Villaggio), and his constantly thwarted attempts to get ahead in life. Much like with the ‘Don Camillo’ comedies this all plays out as a series of individual and isolated comedic sequences and set-pieces so the film is utterly devoid of any cohesive central narrative. What it isn’t lacking though are laughs because this movie is absolutely stuffed with them.

Indeed, the ‘Fantozzi’ comedies were so popular that ten were made between 1975 and 1999, and it’s easy to see the appeal because, going from what I’ve seen here, the humour encompasses everything from slapstick, satire, social commentary, work-place farce, surrealism to cartoon violence and metacinematic digs at film snobs.

The emphasis on physical comedy, which Villaggio executes brilliantly, frequently gives this movie a similar feel to the Sellers/Edwards ‘Pink Panther’ output of the Seventies as we witness Fantozzi continuously smashing into, crashing into or slamming into every destructible and indestructible object he encounters. And if they don’t break him he breaks them.

What’s immediately obvious is that both Villaggio and director Luciano Salce have a perfect grasp of comedic timing and gag construction with every joke, sound effect, pratfall or piece of escalating nonsense given the right amount of energy, punch and punctuation needed to make the laughs land hard, and being freed from the constraints of having to stick to a main plot allows Salce to bombard the audience with a relentless onslaught of various comedic ideas at will.

So one minute Fantozzi is being ping-ponged about by an avalanche of traffic only to then find himself at a casino with his hand stuck under his boss’ backside before floating up into the air like a balloon. There’s also a hunting trip that explodes into full-blown warfare, a hilarious baptism for the “Starship Enterprise” and a 200 mph escape from a dog.

Although the film’s greatest moment is when the voice-over describes how, long ago, Fantozzi was told the correct things to say in order to ingratiate himself with his new supervisor, a supervisor who just so happens to be a rabid art-house cinema fan. Fantozzi succeeds in saying everything this man wants to hear but the result is Fantozzi and his co-workers are then forced to watch Carl Thoedor Dreyer’s ‘Day of Wrath’ (1943) continuously for the next twenty years.

But the supervisor’s favourite film is ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925) with Fantozzi, his family and colleagues frequently ordered to attend compulsory screenings after work followed by a lengthy discussion on Eisenstein’s techniques and themes afterwards. So it’s not surprising that after the billionth time sitting through the movie Fantozzi leads his co-workers in a rebellion leading to what might be the greatest line of dialogue ever proclaimed in any movie –

“In my opinion, ‘The Battleship Potemkin’ is a fucking piece of shit!” as everybody cheers.

Unfortunately Fantozzi’s revolution is quickly put down and after a string of incidents I won’t bother to explain then finds himself not only having to recreate the Odessa Steps sequence but doing so playing the part of the baby that goes tumbling down the stairs in its pram. It’s a wonderful joke targeting Italian film elitism that’s almost as funny as a similar one in Scola’s ‘We All Loved Each Other so Much’ (1974).

So yeah, from what I’ve seen it’s not difficult to understand why the Fantozzi comedies were so popular as they manage to appeal to both mainstreams tastes — cartoon plastic reality, laughing at other people’s pain, explosions, mistaking a chimpanzee for your own daughter — as well as throwing enough satirical and metacinematic material in to satisfy any pretentious, pseudo-intellectuals who might look down on such popular entertainment as they can chuckle away to themselves for getting all the art-house movie references. I know that’s what I was doing.