Eighty-nine years today. Monica Vitti, removed from the public and the big screen for twenty years, remains in the memory and affection of many. His birthday comes the day after that of Gigi Proietti, who left before turning eighty. Together they had interpreted a version of the Tosca signed by Luigi Magni, 1973m the drama by Victorien Sardou revised in an ironic and musical comedy key (the music by Trovajoli, the lyrics by Magni).
We propose again the many reasons to continue to love her, year after year.
The nape, the hair. With Michelangelo Antonioni he introduced Italy and the world to the cinema of incommunicability. The director sees her acting on the Feydeau stage and calls her to dub, with her beautiful hoarse voice, the attendant Dorian Gray in The Cry. It is an artistic and sentimental love at first sight. “She has a nice nape, she could be in cinema,” he says. “Do I also have a face, or do you want to see me only from behind?” is the answer. In the sixties: The adventure, The night, The eclipse in black and white, and the final act in color, Red Desert.
The hoarse voice, the bananas. “But ‘ndo go if you don’t have a banana”. “Yes I love him” and then “I don’t love him anymore”. Unique in a crowd of male performers, it covers every female typology. Bourgeois, neurotic woman, grieving for Antonioni, vital commoner Alberto Sordi. In the second half of the 1960s, Antonioni’s cinema and the same director from whom she had separated from her archived, Monica Vitti switched to the genre of comedy that she had well attended at the theater. With Mario Monicelli (The girl with the gun, 1968) here she is finally freeing her comic vis.
Monica & Alberto. Together with Alberto Sordi (who suffers a lot for her in Amore mio help me, but also leads and given that blow today is less funny) began a partnership that will lead them to the great success of Polvere di Stelle in 1973. In the middle there are the collaborations with our greatest directors: Ettore Scola (Drama della jealousy alongside Giannini and Mastroianni), Dino Risi (We women are like this), Luciano Salce (L’anatra all’arancia), Nanni Loy, Luigi Comencini (two of the episodes of Just Not Knowing Around).
Teresa the thief. In the seventies the actress was directed three times by her then partner, the director of photography of Antonioni Carlo Di Palma, who had moved on to directing. She is Teresa the Thief, Di Palma’s debut film (1973), then the adventure begins here (1975), a motorcyclist in leather suit and full-face helmet in the duo film with Claudia Cardinale (sort of Thelma and Louise ante litteram ) and finally it will turn her into a tabarin queen (Mimì Bluette … flower of my garden, 1976). He will then say about life as a couple, or rather he will write: “Life in common is a thread suspended between two mountains, in the middle, the abyss. You have to walk slowly on that thread, to rediscover the first charm, when you thought: “It’s him, him all my life. It’s him I wanted, with a mustache, serious, slightly sad, but happy in bed”:
Small screen. In the seventies Monica Vitti also made some television forays, while she continued to attend the theater, in ’74 she measured herself with two stars of the small screen such as Raffaella Carrà and Mina singing with them Bellezze al bagno in the Milleluci variety, four years later she performed for the television in the comedy The Cylinder, by Eduardo De Filippo.
Behind the camera, it’s the Eighties. Monica Vitti begins, after the Eighties, to distil appearances on the big screen, appearing above all in the films directed by her new partner, the still photographer who later became director Roberto Russo, (Flirt, 1983; Francesca is mine, 1986) who after 27 years of engagement he married in 2000 in the Capitol. Ten years earlier, her debut as a director for the film Secret Scandal written and interpreted by her, which gave her one last great satisfaction, the David di Donatello for best debut. It is the story of Margherita, Vitti herself, who receives a very modern, automatic camera complete with remote control as a gift from a director friend; her life will change radically and the machine will reveal to her not only her husband’s betrayal with her best friend (Catherine Spaak) but also the desolation of her own existence.
Monica’s secrets. In her life she wrote two books: in ’93 Seven Skirts, an autobiography that took its title from the nickname she had as a child “seven dresses” since, if she was in a hurry, she was able to put on one dress on the other and then , in ’95, The bed is a rose: “Today I write not to remember, but to reinvent everything, to erase and reconstruct faces and facts that revolve around me and laugh with me; not of me “, he says in that volume which is a collection of thoughts and memories, and dreams. On writing:” If these sheets were trees, I could rest under their shadow. If these sheets were shadows, I could dive into them and let myself be carried away . A book in which he reveals secrets: “When at 14 and a half I had almost decided to stop living, I realized that I could do it, to continue, just by pretending to be someone else, and making people laugh as much as possible. in theater and cinema, much less in life “.
Antidiva. We said about the nape of the neck. But also the look; sweet and deep, highlighted by false eyelashes, pencil lines, shaded gray-blue eyeshadows. And the legs, discovered by Monicelli. A reluctant diva, far from the stereotype of the star. But also a professional attentive to the image behind the air of a woman who doesn’t spend too much time gazing at herself. Fiorella Mannoia, who was her stunt double in various films, tells us “Monica wanted control over every photo of her, she was very careful about how it was shot, the lights. She always said to me” when you give the profile, get on this side … She taught me a lot and I am also very attentive to this in my career. She knew I loved to sing “remember it’s your face, don’t let others tell you what’s okay.” “She had incredible charisma. She arrived on set without makeup, going almost unnoticed, her hair in the air. But when, made up and combed, she entered the set I remember that everyone stopped for a moment “.
– .
