Una giornata particolare (A Special Day). 1977. Italy. Directed by Ettore Scola. Screenplay by Scola, Ruggero Maccari, Maurizio Costanzo. With Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, John Vernon, Françoise Berd, Alessandra Mussolini, Vittorio Guerrieri. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K digital restoration by CSC – Cineteca Nazionale. 106 min.
On the day of Hitler’s 1938 state visit to Italy, Antonietta (Loren), a worn-down housewife in thrall to Mussolini, finds herself in an unexpected, brief encounter with Gabriele (Mastroianni), an urbane but distraught radio announcer who must keep his homosexuality a secret from the authorities. With their undeniable chemistry, Loren and Mastroianni bring genuine warmth and pathos to this relationship; as Vincent Canby writes in the New York Times, “The movie takes off in the sort of breathtaking display of teamwork I associate with Hepburn and Tracy, Lunt and Fontanne and, of course, Loren and Mastroianni in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Marriage, Italian Style. They don’t do it all by themselves. [Ettore] Scola…has provided them with good, sometimes quite extravagant material to work with. The screenplay, which he wrote with Ruggero Maccari and, say the credits, ‘in collaboration with Maurizio Costanzo,’ is full of wit and feeling even when we’re aware of facile ironies. But for all the facility, which certainly isn’t bad in itself, A Special Day has a solid foundation in honesty.”