A Special Day
Directed by Ettore Scola, 1977
Marcello Mastroianni, Sofia Loren, John Vernon
It was years ago that I saw Un día muy especial in Lima for the first time. All of my cinéfilos friends who attended frequently the Filmoteca de Lima, were thrilled when it was announced. The movie, directed by Ettore Scola, was more than worthy of the expectation. Later I could not erase from my mind the masculine, gentle voice of Marcello Mastroianni and the sensuality and bright laughter of Sofia Loren, a woman whose beauty transcended the worn and aged housewife look that the role demanded.
The plot was quite amazing. The day that Adolf Hitler visited Mussolini’s Italy in the Fascist-Nazi friendship times just before the war -–when a massive rally of the Duce-adoring populace emptied the neighborhoods-- takes place an unusual encounter: a desperate man who had forcibly lost his radio announcer job because of his homosexuality gets into a strange encounter in the same building complex with this mother of six children who had been left alone by the rally-attending members of her family. The soundtrack is made almost exclusively of the radio broadcast of the rally, while Mastroiani and Loren dance at the cadence of their deep humanity, starving for a meaningful relationship as fleeting and uncertain as this one is.
Well, to make my story short --yes, it's a joke-- years passed by and after searching everywhere here in the US for the English title (I just remembered the original Italian title: Una giornata particolare) and waiting almost two years for it to be available, I got recently the DVD from Netflix and saw it about two nights ago.
I cannot say that it was totally disappointing when I saw it but it was indeed kind of painful. The movie had been dubbed to English with no audio options, and the precise and rich photography that I remembered was just a memory because the movie seemed to have been copied from a VCR rendition, no less, with the irregular colors and the strains from the tape recording and all. What a shame. This great film does not deserve this. Hey, hello there! Where is the Criterion Collection when you need it?
Enough with the whining. Something that I did not know when I saw the film for the first time, was that John Vernon, the Canadian actor that I remembered more for his role as the treacherous friend that is the opposite to Lee Marvin in Point Blank (a great film by John Boorman), acted as Sofia Loren’s husband. It was, after all, a Canadian-Italian co production.
Well, this is it. Of course I recommend to everyone to watch this film wherever in the world you are. Actually, Mastroianni’s voice is not that bad in its English version but, if there is the slightest chance that you can see a better version, closer to the original, go for it.
