The terrace

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Movie
German title The terrace
Original title La terrazza
Country of production Italy , France
original language Italian
Publishing year 1980
length 160 (original version)
140 minutes
Rod
Director Ettore Scola
script Agenore Incrocci
Furio Scarpelli
Ettore Scola
production Pio Angeletti
Adriano De Micheli
music Armando Trovajoli
Pieces by Vivaldi
camera Pasqualino De Santis
cut Raimondo Crociani
occupation

The Italian feature film Die Terrasse (OT: La terrazza) from 1980 deals with failed idealistic intellectuals. Written by the duo Age & Scarpelli and Ettore Scola , who directed the film, the melancholy satire awaits with the actors Marcello Mastroianni , Jean-Louis Trintignant , Stefania Sandrelli , Ugo Tognazzi and Vittorio Gassman . In Cannes in 1980, the work won the screenplay award, and Carla Gravina was named best supporting actress. The screenplay also won the Italian Film Critics' Prize, the Nastro d'Argento . The film did not appear in cinemas in the Federal Republic of Germany; it was only seen on television in 1984.

action

Some old left-wing intellectual friends, now over fifty, meet with companions and other acquaintances in a Roman terrace apartment for a sociable evening. You hold important positions in the film industry, the media and in politics. The discussions about one's own life lead to considerable self-criticism, in which the friends relentlessly reveal their errors and failures. Based on the conversations, the film fades into five episodes, each of which tells of the life of one of the protagonists.

Commissioned by the film producer Amedeo to write something funny again, the screenwriter Enrico can't think of anything. He takes out his anger on his writing utensils, then undertakes an act of self-mutilation and suffers a breakdown. Luigi has gone from being a committed journalist to being a repetitive boring man who doesn't appeal to the younger editorial colleagues. His wife Carla, on the other hand, who has separated from him, is an aspiring, emancipated journalist. A dinner together, at which he hopes to win them over again, only confirms their separation. Sergio, a television cadre , is losing influence. You downsize your office and don't listen to him when making decisions about productions. He has already lost a lot of body weight. Finally he goes to the set up in the basement of the television building, lies down in the artificial snow and dies. The wealthy film producer Amedeo grew up with popular comedies in the 1950s and 1960s. He suffers from his low level of education, which makes him an outsider in the artistic environment. Because his wife Enza has a crush on a presumptuous, pseudo-intellectual young director, he lets herself be tempted to produce a film of the rival. The stilted work with artistic claim turns into a fiasco. The communist deputies Mario finally loves the beautiful young Giovanna. For fear of the reaction of his party colleagues, he does not dare to leave his wife and make his love for Giovanna public; he loses her.

After a few weeks, the company returns to the terrace. Galeazzo, a guest who has long since emigrated from Italy, reproaches his friends for having been dismantled and leaves the meeting. When it starts to rain, the guests take refuge inside, where the men, accompanied by the piano, sing the songs of their youth. The women give them scornful looks.

To the work

The film was shot in Rome and the invented terrace was set up in the studio. Cinematographer Pasqaulino De Santis chose subtle pastel colors for the exterior and some interior shots . The screenplay co-writer Agenore Incrocci , also "Age", rejected comparisons of the terrace with last year in Marienbad : Marienbad is played out in memory and has an open structure, while the terrace is extremely objective and with calendar rigor. The second coszenarist, his long-time colleague Furio Scarpelli , confessed: Anyone who, like her, creates moral images, expresses himself through satire or conducts investigations in the form of farces or comedies, gradually develops into a moralist . The discovery that she herself, like everyone else, can be the object of irony made her blush. Director Scola explained that the protagonists did not trigger certain miserable conditions in Italian society; “Nevertheless, through one or the other kind of complicity, consciously or unconsciously, they are not innocent.” They suffered from the question of the extent to which they could be partly responsible and whether they should have acted differently.

So Scola, Age & Scarpelli hold up a mirror to their profession, their friends and their ideals. All five men portrayed have at least one foot left in their childhood - Enrico draws faces with a typewriter, Luigi and Mario are unable to relate, Amedeo lacks artistic maturity and Sergio is attached to the captain Fracasse of his childhood. The women surpass them in dedication (Emanuela), maturity (Carla), professional competence (Enza) and passion (Giovanna). The confrontation with a new femininity is more difficult for men than the loss of their ideals. Two of the episodes lead to castration metaphors or scenes. Nevertheless, the women play supporting roles in the story.

The temporal relation of the individual episodic narrative strands to the meetings on the terrace as well as to each other is not clarified, but is also of little importance. The repeated repetition of the beginning of the festival within the film leads nowhere and illustrates the inner emptiness as well as the dwindled creativity of the men associated with the film industry. The impression is reinforced by the presence of the greats of Italian comedy films - Mastroianni, Gassman, Tognazzi, Trintignant - who no longer cause laughter. Thus the film tacitly assumes that the artistic approaches of the Italian film comedy are stuck in a dead end and no longer have the power to influence everyday life. Scola noted that these people had not perceived their role as mediators between the world of thoughts and the public: “This symbolic terrace is like an imaginary elephant cemetery.” One must clearly distinguish between “the popular and the vulgar” and it is less serious To make concessions to the public rather than to criticism.

Criticism

In Italy and France

In Italy, the variety of reviews ranged from very bad to mixed to full approval. Scarpelli was only baffled by the agreement of the “petty intellectuals” there, who claimed that the “mere observation of reality” in the film was incorrect. On the contrary, it was precisely the outbreak of presumptuous anger in these circles that confirmed the correctness of the presentation. “That was it: the gossip of a group of intellectuals against a film that accused them of gossip.” One of the sympathetic voices was La Nazione : “It's not so much a satirical film as a melancholy confession that the Generation of established fifty-year-olds. The film is sometimes reminiscent of Chekhov scenes. It is certainly one of Scola's most successful films in which the director, together with Age and Scarpelli, abandoned the structure of the 'commedia' in order to preserve their mood in a better, more subtle, and more authentic way. "

The Le Monde critic Jean de Baroncelli said after the premiere in Cannes: “Autopsy of an intelligentsia out of breath, Pavane for a deceased generation, thoughts of a moralist about the passage of time, lost illusions, the feeling of failure, which is often the age-related decline accompanied: The Scola film is a bit of all of this. ”The film reminded the Revue de cinéma of the universe of Claude Sautet , but Scola approached the subject in a more concrete and strict manner. "At the same time funny and dramatic, ironic and touched, practicing cruel satire but without ever disregarding its victims, the film takes on a very high level of social commitment and intellectual responsibility [...]". It is about popular cinema in the best sense of the word. For Positif , it was one of those films that were only half-convincing when they were released, but would gain in importance over time that, at best, could be felt in advance at the moment. Too cautiously, the director vacillates undecided between realism and fable and the story fails to develop some interesting approaches. But these defects are actually unimportant. Because the script extends the already extensive fresco of Italy, begun with We Had So Loved Us (1974), by a relief, a depth, a seriousness that Scola’s previous work did not achieve. The three authors, who are among the most brilliant in contemporary cinema, treated the subject of failed masculinity with secret tenderness and grandiose irony.

In German-language publications

Hans Gerhold spoke of an "intelligent social comedy" in the film service . “Scola sees the apparently progressive milieu in its identity crises and depressions as an exemplary contradiction between wishes and their (non-) realization. The characters, which are so different, are lovingly drawn, not denounced and their states of mind are described in a humorous way. ”Despite its length and the many dialogues, the work is“ extremely worth seeing, especially since cameraman Pasqualino de Santis orchestrates the space with drives and pans and change of perspective succeeded in creating some apt visual metaphors for the lostness of the artist and the mendacity of the intellectual [...] ”. The zoom saw the former idealist to "cynical and unrealistic talkers and theorists" degenerate. He suspected that the still challenging young will be no different from the established old and the still dynamic women no different from the men. "Those who set out to change the world have not changed themselves, but are thrown back on their age-old, (all too) human needs and feelings." Age & Scarpelli and Scola had evidently dealt with their own situation in the "sophisticated" script . “Your intelligent, funny, bitter and resigned social satire full of precise dialogues and sentences rarely gets stuck in non-binding, clichéd. But: what will your next films look like? Will the three of them know how to draw conclusions from their self-criticism, or is their self-accusatory film just an alibi exercise? The future will tell. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L'Avant-Scène Cinéma , No. 262, February 15, 1981, p. 4, and Positif No. 234, September 1980, p. 65
  2. ↑ a b c Marcel Martin: La terrasse . In: Revue de cinéma , November 1980, pp. 30-32
  3. ↑ Pasqaulino De Santis in Positif No. 230, May 1980, p. 25: Entretiens avec Pasqaulino De Santis
  4. ^ Agenore Incrocci in L'Avant-Scène Cinéma , No. 262, February 15, 1981, p. 5
  5. ^ A b Furio Scarpelli in L'Avant-Scène Cinéma , No. 262, February 15, 1981, pp. 5-7
  6. ↑ Ettore Scola in Paese sera of February 3, 1980, cited above. in: Jean A. Gili: Ettore Scola. Une pensée graphique . Isthme éditions, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-35409-015-9 , p. 35
  7. ↑ a b Christian Viviani: Une soirée particulière (La Terrasse) . In: Positif No. 234, September 1980, pp. 64-65
  8. ^ Peter Bondanella: La comédie "métacinématographique" d'Ettore Scola . In: CinémAction No. 42: La comédie italienne de Don Camillo à Berlusconi . Corlet, Condé-sur-Noireau 1987, p. 98
  9. ↑ Ettore Scola quoted. in Martin 1980, pp. 31-32
  10. ↑ criticism from Sergio Frosali in La Nazione , zit. in: Claudio G. Fava, Mathilde Hochkofler: Marcello Mastroianni. His films - his life. Heyne, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-453-02625-X , p. 283
  11. ↑ Jean de Baroncelli quoted. in: Jean A. Gili: Ettore Scola. Une pensée graphique . Isthme éditions, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-35409-015-9 , p. 35
  12. ↑ Hans Gerhold in film-dienst No. 9/1984
  13. ^ Tibor de Viragh: La terrazza . In: Zoom , No. 19, October 1, 1980, pp. 18-20