Born in 1931, He passed for one of the last great masters of Italian cinema, Director of masterpieces starring Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Vittorio Gassman or Nino Manfredi. He had particularly signed We both loved (1974), A special day (1977) or Family (1987).
In forty years of career, the Director has staged nearly forty films. His style is known for his boldness and singularity.
He mixes acuity of psychological analysis, ferocious caricature of modern societies, irony, stuffing, disenchantment, melancholy and narrative and formal research unpublished. Repeatedly winning the Caesars as Cannes or at the silver ribbons Awards, the filmmaker leaves behind great masterpieces of the seventh art.
Return on ten of its feature films, that have marked the history of the seventh art:
SE permettete parliamo di donne, directed 1964, is the first feature film by Ettore Scola, who had previously signed to scenarios, including for Dino Risi. The fashion then was the anthology film. Many Italian filmmakers had worked in this genre, and not least, Since Fellini, Visconti, De Sica and Monicelli two years earlier for the very famous film were associated with Boccaccio 70.
Here, Ettore Scola is alone at the controls. He directs the actor Vittorio Gassman, who plays the central character in the nine sketches. Title originally SE permettete parliamo di donne, the film highlights the difficulties in relations between men and women.
The story takes place in 1944. Gianni, Nicola and Antonio bind friendship while they took the maquis to fight the Germans. When sounds the hour of liberation, a new world opens to them. Ardent activists, full of dreams and illusions, Here they are ready to make the revolution.
Then all three, at different times, go have an adventure with Luciana, Hood actress, life between them after the fall of the fascist regime and the advent of the Republic. Gianni, lawyer seeking clients, wife Elide, the daughter of a coarse reached, then finds herself widowed. Nicola, which was to be a film critic, became a teacher in the province where he abandoned his family for Rome. Antonio will remain stretcher-bearer in a Roman Hospital but eventually marry Luciana.
By chance, all three meet but the communication between them became quite different from that of their youth: "We wanted to change the world., but the world changed us!», said one of the protagonists... The film is explicitly dedicated to Italian Director Vittorio De Sica, died of lung cancer the 13 November 1974.
- Awful, sales and wicked (1976)
At the 29th edition of the Festival de Cannes, the film won the prize for directing in 1976. The film was almost entirely shot in Rome, in the area of Monte Ciocci, where you can see the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. This area was really busy, until 1977, by slums inhabited by the unemployed and workers working in the shipyards of the neighborhoods. As a first step, Ettore Scola intended to do a documentary on this subject. He decided instead to broach the subject in the form of a fictional comedy.
The film tells the daily life of a family of the Fourth World, originally from Puglia, in a slum in Rome in the early 1970. About 20 people - parents, children, their spouses or lovers, grandchildren, and the grandmother - are crammed into a squalid slum, lifetime of petty theft and prostitution, under the tyrannical authority of the one-eyed Patriarch, Giacinto Mazzatella (Nino Manfredi), stingy and brutal.
It has a bundle of a million lire, received in compensation for losing the use of one eye. He is obsessed with the fear that one of his relatives might him steal the hoard. He becomes infatuated with an obese prostitute, begins to spend his money with her, the same prompt to come live with him, What arouses the wrath of his wife. It, to wash the affront, with the family organizes the assassination of her husband and father unworthy.
Starring 1977, UNA giornata particolare takes place in full Italian Fascist period, where we are witnessing the meeting of two beings that everything seems to be separate: Antonnietta, embodied on the screen by Sophia Loren and Gabriele, played by Marcello Mastroianni.
In Rome, the 8 more 1938, Hitler meets Mussolini. All the Romans have left their homes to attend to the ceremony. In a great building, Antonietta, in good mother of large families (in accordance with mussolinien indoctrination: a husband all that there is more macho and six children), is forced to stay home to take care of household chores while she would be well gone to see the Duce as everyone.
Random will bring it into contact with a lonely man that she saw in an apartment across the Court. It's Gabriele, a homosexual intellectual who, for this reason, has been excluded from the national radio where he was presenter and is threatened with deportation.
Ettore Scola himself, and to make this film of renowned actors such as Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marcello Mastroianni or Serge Reggiani. They embody some longtime friends, owned in the middle of the cultural left, find themselves for a ritual evening buffet on the vast Roman terrace of one of them. The camera wanders and surprising conversations can, following a character in his life, before returning to the evening and to follow another. The enthusiasm of the youth has given way to bitterness and the findings of chess, professional than sentimental.
The feature follows successively Enrico, writer short of inspiration, Luigi, journalist that his wife left, Sergio, an official of RAI, public television, anorexic and depressed, Amedeo, film producer, and Mario, Communist Deputy who will have an affair.
Presented at the 34th Cannes Film Festival, en 1981, the feature film is adapted from Fosca, the most famous novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, published as a serial in the magazine It pungolo en 1869, and then published in a volume in the same year.
It is one of the most representative novels of Scapigliatura, this protest literary movement in Northern Italy around the years 1860. The film, faithful to the book in all, modifies the end, which it highlights the dramatic effect. More even than a reflection on the beauty and love, book and movie dissect the mechanism of passion. Bernard Giraudeau and Laura Antonelli play key roles.
- La Nuit de Varennes (1982)
The film is based on the novel by Catherine Rihoit, The night of Varennes or the Impossible is not french. He says the leak and arrest at Varennes of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette. In Paris, in June 1791, the libertine writer Restif de La Bretonne (played by Jean-Louis Barrault) is the witness of departure, in middle of the night and since the Royal Palace, of a mysterious carriage.
Intrigued, the writer starts in pursuit in the company of Giacomo Casanova. He soon discovers that this coach is attempting to join another party earlier and whose occupants are nothing less than the members of the Royal family...
The film won 1884 numerous awards: César award for best film, César award for Best Director, but also César award for best film for the signed soundtrack music Vladimir Cosma.
The story takes place in a ballroom where redéfile the history of the France: years 20 in the years 80. At the discretion of music that have punctuated the decades like jazz, rock'roll or even the disco, the Popular Front, the second world war, the release and may 68 are thus evoked.
Ettore Scola pays tribute to French actress Fanny Ardant in La Cena. She portrays the role of Flora, a chic restaurant owner, located in the heart of a big city, could be Rome. The latter secretly loves an intellectual and is also secretly loved by one of its servers. It receives, tonight - the, 40 customers environments and diverse interests that everyone at his table tells a story.
- Unfair competition (2001)
One of the latest achievements by Ettore Scola. Unfair competition, starring 2001, takes place in Rome, in the years 30. It tells the story of Umberto and Leone, two shopkeepers in garment shops and apartments are neighbouring. They engage in a competition without mercy and to hate openly. Yet their two sons are now friends, and the daughter of Leone and the eldest of Umberto are in love one another. During this time, the fascists are in power.
Concerned first and foremost the functioning of its trade, Umberto works half-heartedly with the regime, Despite the criticisms of his brother, Angelo, a college professor. One day, a new dispute between Umberto and Leone turns to the fight. They were taken to the police station. There, It is suggested to Umberto's play on the fact that Leone is Jewish for him into trouble. Umberto refuses…
Great Italian intellectual, the writer Umberto Eco, died on the night of Friday to Saturday at the age of 84 years, was an academic, linguist and philosopher who rose to global fame with a medieval and erudite thriller, The name of the rose .
