La Notte brava (1959)
Directed by Mauro Bolognini

Film Review

Although much of his work is largely forgotten today, Mauro Bolognini was one of the leading Italian filmmakers of his generation, a daring and sometimes controversial figure who played as large a role in the rebirth of Italian cinema in the 1950s and 60s as his more flamboyant contemporaries, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni.   Bolognini's films are famous for their earthy realism and lurid sensuality, typified by the famous orgy scene in Il Bell'Antonio (1960), and they provide as vivid a reflection of Italian society at the time as those of any other filmmaker.  La Notte brava (a.k.a. The Big Night or Les Garçons) is a good example not only of Bolognini's distinctive style of cinema, which manages to bridge the gap between the gritty neo-realism of the past and the sleek modernism that had started to emerge in the late 1950s, but also of his profound social conscience, in particular his concern for the most pressing social issue of the time: mass unemployment amongst the young.

Bolognini was not the only filmmaker to show an interest in this subject matter.  Italian cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s is dominated by films featuring idle young men who, unable to find work, resort to a life of petty crime, either to make ends meet or just to fill the empty waking hours.  The fruit of Fascism, which led the country to ruin and humiliation in WWII, was a generation of lost souls who drifted without purpose, living only for the moment and contemptuous of the old values and old institutions, including the church and marriage.  Fellini portrays this age of vacuous decadence most vividly in La Dolce vita (1960), and Pier Paolo Pasolini tackles it from a more realistic and humane perspective in Accattone (1961).  Bolognini's La Notte brava fits neatly between these two films - on the face of it, it appears to glorify the carefree life of the debauched young, who rob, violate and cheat each other without the slightest pang of conscience so that they can indulge their carnal appetites to the full; in fact, it is probably Italian cinema's bleakest commentary on a generation that had, through no fault of its own, lost its way.

Bolognini first made a name for himself with Gli innamorati (1955), a fine example of neo-realist rosa depicting the tangled love lives of a group of young working class people.  Having made a few anti-establishment comedies, Bolognini fell in with an aspiring young screenwriter, Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he would make some of his mostly highly regarded films.  La Notte brava was one of the most successful films to come out of the improbable Bolognini-Pasolini partnership, an adaptation of Pasolini's 1956 novel Ragazzi di vit which created such a public outcry on its first publication that it was heavily censored for its subsequent editions.  The director and screenwriter had very different ideas for the film and very nearly fell out over the casting.  A committed neo-realist, Pasolini wanted non-professional actors for the lead roles, but the more commercially minded Bolognini overruled him and cast a number of rising stars of Italian and French cinema, including Franco Interlenghi, Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Claude Brialy, thereby ensuring the film's marketability outside Italy.

From the memorable opening sequence, in which two stunning prostitutes hurl abuse at each other across a busy motorway, we have an immediate sense of the direction of travel that the film will take.  Straight away, Bolognini gives us a visual metaphor for modern Italy, a place where people can no longer connect with one another, where every man (and woman) is an island, looking out for his own self-interest, standing alone in an arid urban wasteland.  Bolognini employs a whole host of similarly barren locations in the film to drive home the emptiness of the protagonists' lives and their inability to bond with one another.  It's a dog-eat-dog world the film shows us, and everyone is out for what he can get, often by the dirtiest, most underhand means at his disposal. 

Having made some easy money by selling some stolen rifles, the impossibly handsome male protagonists (Brialy, Terzieff and Interlenghi) turn their hand to extorting something for nothing from a trio of man-hating prostitutes they lure into their joy ride; needless to say, they are outsmarted and the liberated modern woman scores a minor victory over male chauvinism.  After this misogynistic feeding frenzy, Bolognini then treats us to a grandiose exhibition of male bonding which culminates in the film's most notorious sequence, an all-male orgy in a swanky Roman villa, of the kind that was no doubt de rigueur two thousand years previously.  Bolognini spares us the sordid details but from the homoerotic signals being fired in every direction, it is obvious that heavy consumption of alcohol is not the only vice to have been indulged in.

After their happy hour up at the villa, the three enterprising heroes abscond with yet another wad of stolen cash and immediately fall out with one another, proving that there is absolutely no honour amongst thieves.  The banknotes change hands several times before every one of them is squandered in a night of pointless pleasure-seeking.   Once the night has passed, the characters are all back where they started, with empty pockets and even emptier stomachs, ready to repeat the whole adventure again.  Bolognini clearly doesn't expect his audience to identify with his characters, who are selfish and narcissistic in the extreme, but it is hard not to sympathise with them, condemned as they are to live a life that is no more than a series of cheap hedonistic thrills intended to distract from the sheer meaningless of their existence.  It's a long, dark night that Scintillone and Ruggeretto inhabit, and one that feels depressingly familiar...

Film Synopsis

Scintillone and Ruggeretto, two young drifters from the poor suburbs of Rome, hope to make a tidy sum by selling the car they have stolen with its valuable cargo of weaponry.  To find a buyer, they enlist the help of a third man, Gino la Belle, and once they have completed the transaction they set out to amuse themselves in the countryside with some prostitutes.  Naturally, the men have no intention of paying the women for their services, but the women have other ideas and rob them of their ill-gotten gains.  Tired of female company, our three heroes join up with a well-heeled young man from a better part of town and accompany him back to his comfortable villa for an all-male party.  Gino shows his gratitude by running off with money stolen from his unsuspecting host.  The truce between them now well and truly over, Gino, Ruggeretto and Scintillone soon fall out over the money, with the result that only one of them will enjoy the big night he had hoped for...