Introduction to La meglio gioventù

The six-hour mini-series La meglio gioventù, made for Italian state television but also given an international cinema release in two parts, is a family saga built around the tale of two brothers and covers a period from the mid-1960s to the early 21st century. On Italian television the film attracted nearly eight million viewers and provoked a massive discussion and even celebration in the press, with one non-film magazine devoting an entire edition to the heroes of the generation represented in the film. David Forgacs (2004), otherwise sympathetic to the film, has commented of it:

I disagree with Forgacs (though the article which contains this comment is a very good introduction to the film, and you may even wish to start with it before reading the rest of my introduction). I would suggest that we link the particular politics of La meglio gioventù to its sentimentality and see them as essential to each other. La meglio gioventù is a political film, but one that might not be recognized or acknowledged as such because of its avoidance of explicit party politics, because of its schematic aspects, and because of its undoubted sentimentality. It employs a nostalgic and middlebrow mode in order to address its audience as a constituency; that is, as a group aware of itself in political terms. The film formulates its account of recent Italian history on behalf of this constituency, and hopes to reproduce the constituency by articulating and celebrating its experience.

Even as it is ideological, in a way I will explain below, La meglio gioventù eschews big politics (in its presentation of the ‘terrorist’ character Giulia it even presents ideology as pathological). Its micro-politics are clear, however — Italy’s cultural and artistic heritage, the concern with the treatment of the mentally ill, with the anti-mafia movement, and with the fact and legacies of terrorism and so on — but the attention is directed more specifically to the experience of the protagonists than to the issues with which they are concerned. To put it another way, the issues and events featured are less important than their narrative processing over the duration of the mini-series. This constitutes the film’s sentimental mode, its favouring of emotions and private experience over the events of public life, even as it celebrates civic engagement.

In terms of the film’s unacknowledged ideology, the sentimental mode is instrumental in disavowing the project of excision of a violent heritage of left-wing terrorism, a project necessary to the remaking of the left as a centre left with legitimate claims on power (rather than merely a moral opposition) in the new century. This was the period when a broad spectrum of parties from far to centre left were trying to cement a coalition in opposition to that led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The broad left of La meglio gioventù is the cultural analogue for this political project.

Let’s be more specific about the constituency represented and addressed in La meglio gioventù. The film addresses, celebrates and hopes, in a sense, to reproduce iconographically those protagonists of civic society known as the reflexive middle classes. The reproduction of this political constituency is figured symbolically in the film by the reconfiguration of the nuclear family around Nicola, Mirella, and the blue-eyed son she conceived with Nicola’s dead brother. Indeed, the political reproduction and the familial reconfiguration are enabled by the purgative suicide of this brother, Matteo, in whom political disappointment has been invested in order to be expunged. His choice of career (he joins the army and then the police) is shown in the film to be pathological, a distortion of his early idealism into an evasion of personal and political responsibility.

The film’s, then, is an ideological project couched in a post-ideological celebration of a constituency validated by the uncontroversial exclusion of certain groups, an operation that is easy for the mafia but more complicated for the terrorists. The abbreviated reference to the murder by the mafia of judge Giovanni Falcone is under-motivated from a plot perspective and has another function: it is a kind of lowest-common-denominator historical atrocity before which almost all viewers would find themselves united in dismay. Such moments enable a consensus which disguises the exclusions the film is obliged to perform in order to guarantee the concord of the constituency addressed. The emotional intransigence of the brother Matteo and his increasing alienation are mirrored in the fate of Giulia, whose choice of clandestinity and terrorist action is, as I said above, also implied to be pathological. Giulia is not killed off by the film, but she is aged (in prison) in a way that occurs to no other character. In fact, one of the clumsy or, just possibly, intentional aspects of the film is that the main protagonists seem barely to age at all over the course of thirty and more years (thus remaining in a literal sense ‘the best of youth’). Yet Giulia’s hair, initially shown as flowing and blonde, then cut and dyed black when she opts for clandestine life, is transformed into a metallic grey from one scene to the next. The point may seem minor, but the destruction of her beauty is obviously meant as an equivalent for the condition of her political soul. Likewise, in contrast to the film’s wholehearted investment in Nicola’s reformist zeal, Giulia’s choices are never investigated, and her move into the armed struggle seems to skip a whole intermediate stage of political activity that might have been characteristic of the extra-parliamentary left in the early 1970s.

We could argue that La meglio gioventù is a reactionary text, though not for the reasons usually given (its sentimentality, its conventional form). As Danielle Hipkins has argued (in a workshop at Leeds in 2006), the film ‘seamlessly presents history and the male gaze as one’, with woman, or her image, once again located as the object of this gaze, and reduced to a symbolic role as l’Italia malata (‘sick Italy’, the character of Giorgia who suffers from mental illness) or the metonymic token of exchange between the male protagonists (Mirella, who loves first one, and then the other, of the two brother protagonists – see the notes to seminar 6) or the hysterical and hyperbolic inflection of the woman in the public/political sphere (Giulia the terrorist, though I shouldn't forget the counter-example of the character of Giovanna, Nicola’s sister, who is a campaigning judge). But because the film is so ritualistically dismissed for its conventional form I feel I need to defend it (and to point out that the reactionary gender and other aspects are shared by plenty of more admired films).

La meglio gioventù is concerned with the experience of its protagonists more than events per se. For some this already excludes it from the category of historical film. In seminar 7 we discussed how various historians and critics sympathetic to the idea that film can do history nonetheless make a dubious distinction between ‘good’ historical films and ‘bad’ ones, which include heritage films. In response to this I quoted Marnie Hughes-Warrington, who writes: ‘A number of scholars dismiss “costume”, “melodrama”, “period” and “heritage” films in favour of “historical” films, as if the features and distinctions between these categories are readily apparent’ (2007: 36). La meglio gioventù is a heritage film. In fact the maintaining of Italy’s cultural heritage is one of the themes of the film, and it shows its characters working to save a heritage narrowly defined: after the floods in Florence in 1966, and in the work of fresco restoration undertaken by another character. But in a less literal sense, we can link it with films like Piazza delle Cinque Lune (Renzo Martinelli, 2003), Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005) and Tre fratelli (Francesco Rosi, 1981) which, like it, employ ravishing images of Italy that ‘owe as much to the iconography of advertising, tourism and the heritage industry, as to the inheritance of neorealism’ (Mary P. Wood writing of Tre fratelli, 2005: 198). And this is still the case though controversial and even traumatic aspects of Italian history, like terrorism, are dealt with in the film: these have become a necessary if gloomy part of a chiaroscuro national epic, consistent in their appeal with the gorgeous vistas that introduce each location in La meglio gioventù, and which vary from panoramas of the Coliseum to spectacular framings of the Aeolian Islands. These shots allow a vision of a picturesque Italy that represents the heritage the film is fighting to preserve, and terrorism is part of this heritage — a tarnished heritage, certainly, but one with its own fascination.

Some have seen an opposition between the ‘new political vigour’ of a film like Aprile (Nanni Moretti, 1998) and the conservative aesthetic of ‘high quality “genre” products’ like Nuovo cinema paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), Mediterraneo (Gabriele Salvatores, 1991), to which one could add La meglio gioventù and a film like Il grande sogno (Michele Placido, 2009) (Gordon 2000: 212-3). But the political charge of a text like La meglio gioventù is derived precisely from its heritage appeal, an aspect of the flattering address to a reflexive middle class proud of the look and legacy of the best of Italy. In this sense the sentimentality of the film is essential to its politics.

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References

David Forgacs (2004). ‘Our Friends From Turin’, Sight and Sound, 14: 7, 28-30. Available at <http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/76>.

Robert S.C. Gordon (2000). ‘Impegno and the Encounter with Modernity: “High” Culture in Post-War Italy’, in Italy Since 1945, ed. by Patrick McCarthy  (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 197-213 

Marnie Hughes-Warrington (2007). History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge)

Mary P. Wood (2005). Italian Cinema (Oxford: Berg)