By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(A review of Pranzo di Ferragosto (2008) originally published on January 4, 2011 in my blog draupadiarjun)
Pranzo di Ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch), the 2008 Italian film that won many prizes, including the Satyajit Ray Award at the London Film Festival in 2008, is like a memory that seemed blah in the making but is rewarding on every return visit. Like Sundays spent once upon a time at the grandparents', when time seemed not to pass and conversation was a threadbare fuzzy blanket, when the food was a feast, when withered folks eyed you lovingly and there was happiness in the air.
Gianni di Gregorio (also the debutant director) plays Gianni, a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who spends his time looking after his ninety-three-year-old mother, Valeria (played by Valeria De Franciscis). He is apparently not working but, in a very Italian reversal of gender roles, is really a full-time housewife and unpaid caregiver for his tenderly imperious mother who, though mobile, is not up doing much else besides watching television and dressing for the delicious meals that Gianni cooks.
Life has stopped for Gianni in his mother’s apartment, among her pictures and bric-a-brac, in the very neighborhood of Rome where he grew up, at the bar where his mounting debt is cheerfully deferred, among the buddies he has relied on since he was a child. Yet, when the mid-August Feast of the Assumption of Mary comes around, and all working Romans are off on holiday, “unemployed” and consequently broke Gianni's apron strings are tied up with Mama.
He hasn’t paid his condominium dues for three years and some privileges have sloughed away, such as having a key to the elevator. The situation is quite desperate (and Gianni’s diastolic blood pressure will soon hit 110) but his politeness (“a lot of comedy is derived from being limited by having to be polite: the constraints of my upbringing," Di Gregorio said in an interview with Timeout London in May 2010) and white wine keep him from seizing the day.
The end-of-harvest feast day, however, has its own plans for Gianni. It demands that he tally up all that he has harvested over the years. How deep is his goodness? Is it just an excuse for not doing anything too arduous? The sapping routine of any given day is suddenly demolished and at nightfall Gianni is not describing D’Artagnan’s physiognomy to Valeria, but tucking in three more temperamental old ladies!
And so the stopover at Gianni and Valeria’s turns out to be a holiday for the visiting ladies, a break from family and rules and other people’s ideas about old-lady foods and old-lady entertainment. In their several tiresome, touching ways, they affirm life and at the end we see Gianni, who’s always smiling but never fully alive in the moment, collapsing with laughter, the sound of life.
The soundtrack, by Stefano Ratchev and Mattia Carratello, features Titine Tango, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s memorable misrendition of Je cherche après Titine. That Modern Times (1936) sequence began when the Tramp launched himself into the café tenor’s performance space. Having lost the lyrics that Paulette Goddard had scribbled on his cuff, the Tramp had to sing-provize for his supper. In Pranzo di Ferragosto Gianni loses the script of his uninteresting life for a minute. And, in his role as scriptwriter and director, Di Gregorio too decided to lose the script now and then while filming, mostly in his mother’s apartment in Travestere. Consequently, the ladies, (Valeria De Franciscis, Marina Cacciotti, Maria Cali and Grazia Cesarini Sforza), none of whom is a professional actor, and all of whom went by their real first names in the film, were allowed to say the lines they wished, rather than learn their lines. The camera followed their moods. The result of all this unpredictability is charming, chilblains, hooked nose, wrinkles, wig, and fresh fish, Sicilian pasta and lots and lots of white wine somehow adding up to happiness.
The DVD, incidentally, includes two recipes, filetti di persico con patate, and pasta al forno, the latter laced with Gianni’s favorite white wine.
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