When Danger is Boring

Film: Casanova 70
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on rockin’ flatscreen.

I really wanted to like Casanova 70. I really did. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that it would be in the same vein as films like Divorce, Italian Style and Marriage, Italian Style. After all, all three of these films are Italian sex comedies from the 1960s starring Marcello Mastroianni. Casanova 70, as the third in that trio, had to have what the others did, but more and better, right?

Actually, not so much. I realized pretty quickly that I had more or less seen this as a short a number of years ago. Woody Allen remade this as one of the scenarios in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. One of the vignettes in Allen’s film is about a woman who can only achieve an orgasm when she has sex in public. Allen plays the husband and has the entire thing filmed both in Italian and in the sort of style used for this film. It’s a direct nod to this sort of sex comedy, because in this film, Mastroianni’s character can only find himself interested in sex at all if there is a serious hint of danger involved. No danger, no sexy times.

Rabble Rousing

Film: I Compagni (The Organizer)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Fifteen minutes into I Compagni (The Organizer) and I paused the film. I was sure that this was made by Vittorio de Sica since quite a bit of it reminded me of Ladri di Biciclette. No soap, though. This is a film by Mario Monicelli, so any similarities to de Sica are either coincidental or homage.

Evidently, the world needed more films about the poor and oppressed workers of the world, because that is precisely where we’re going to be for the vast bulk of this film. Specifically in this case, we’re going to be in Turin, Italy, and dealing with the workers of a massive textile factory around the end of the 19th century. As with many factory workers during all stages of the Industrial Revolution, the workers here are the very definition of oppressed. We see young Omero (Franco Ciolli), a teenaged boy who by all right should be in school, getting up before the sun to get to work. The workday starts at 6:00am and ends at 8:30pm, with a half hour break for lunch. It’s not specifically brought up, but I’d suspect that it’s also a six-day work week. Our first day in the factory with the workers concludes with an old man getting his hand caught in one of the massive machines.