Ettore Scola, Italian Film Director of Satire and Farce, Dies at 84
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Version 0 of 1. Ettore Scola, a Golden Globe winner and five-time Oscar nominee who was considered among the great directors and screenwriters of Italian cinema, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 84. He had been in a coma since Sunday, RAI state radio said in announcing his death. Mr. Scola’s death “leaves a huge void in Italian culture,” the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said, praising him for his portrayals of “Italy, its society and the changes it went through” in the last half of the 20th century. The more than 40 movies Mr. Scola directed over 40 years were emblematic of the mix of caustic satire and farce for which Italian films became known. Many unfolded against a factual backdrop as he struggled to come to grips with history. “Over the last 20 years, Mr. Scola has staked out his own particular terrain in the Italian cinema,” Stephen Harvey, co-curator of a 1988 exhibition of Mr. Scola’s films at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that year in The New York Times. “While Federico Fellini continues to explore the fanciful world of his own making, and the Tavianis mine a rich vein of poetic folklore, this director is Italy’s most acute social chronicler,” Mr. Harvey continued. “Mr. Scola’s people are always haplessly swept along by the tides of their times, from the French Revolution (‘La Nuit de Varennes’) through Il Duce’s would-be empire (‘A Special Day’) to the rudderless present exposed in the last reels of ‘The Family.’” “A Special Day,” which Mr. Scola directed and co-wrote, won the Golden Globe for best foreign film and received two Academy Award nominations. (It was nominated for best foreign-language film, and Marcello Mastroianni, who co-starred with Sophia Loren, was nominated for best actor.) In the movie, released in 1977, Ms. Loren played an exploited housewife and Mr. Mastroianni played her neighbor, a gay anti-fascist radio reporter. The two spontaneously become star-crossed lovers on the day in 1938 when nearly everyone else in Rome is in the streets cheering Hitler’s visit to Mussolini. “Viva Italia!” (originally released as “I Nuovi Mostri”), an episodic comedy for which he directed several segments, was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar in 1979. His “Le Bal” (1983), which chronicled, without dialogue, a half-century of French society through the prism of a ballroom, was also nominated for that award. Ettore Scola was born in Trevico, in the province of Avellino in southern Italy, on May 10, 1931. He was raised in Rome. The closest any of his films came to being autobiographical was “The Family” (1987), which instructs moviegoers in 80 years of European history from the vantage point of an apartment that housed five generations of a clan whose story is recounted by a retired professor, its last patriarch. “It was like a big tribe composed of people who didn’t really know each other very well but respected the rules that bound them together,” Mr. Scola recalled of his own family. “The house was like a place filled with mirrors but no windows — you looked at each other but not at the world outside.” He is survived by his wife, Gigliola, and two daughters, Paola and Silvia, who completed a documentary film about their father last year. When he was only 16, Mr. Scola began ghostwriting for the comic actor known as Toto, and before he turned 30 he was producing scripts under his own name. His directorial debut was in 1964 with “Let’s Talk About Women,” the first of many collaborations with Vittorio Gassman. “My aim was to become a director like Steno and Monicelli; they were my models,” Mr. Scola recalled. “The strength of Italian comedy is that it was an outgrowth of neorealism — in an exaggerated form it always represented daily life.” Comfortable with his own professional team, he even directed an English-language film, “Macaroni,” starring Mr. Mastroianni and Jack Lemmon, in Naples. He was also noted for films known in English as “We All Loved Each Other So Much” (1974), “Ugly, Dirty and Bad” (1976), “Passion of Love” (1981) and “That Night in Varennes” (1982), an epic of the French Revolution. In 2013 he released “How Strange to Be Named Federico: Scola Narrates Fellini,” an affectionate documentary tribute to the director that was shown at the Venice Film Festival. “From childhood, history was a subject that fascinated me, and what I kept wondering was how everyday life might have been different, if Caesar or Mussolini had changed course,” Mr. Scola once said. “My sympathy always went to those millions who didn’t participate in those choices, but had to follow them.” Mr. Scola was a Communist in the 1980s, but said he did not believe in dogma or flag-waving and expressed an optimism built on faith in those millions of followers. “At the end of ‘The Family’ the old ways are gone, but all the descendants keep on living, finding their own ways of being a family,” he said. “Look, even if things go badly, in the end we’re more important than the powerful ones, the people you don’t see in my films. The flow of history lies with us.” |