Rhetorical Question

WHY Directed by NANNI LOY Screenplay by SERGIO AMIDEI and EMILIO SANNA

This is a movie that confounds all preconceptions and expectations. The plot--an innocent man is vaguely accused of a crime and shunted from prison to prison--suggests political reform, social outrage, harrowing character study and, ultimately, Kafka. But thanks to the skill of the superb comic actor Alberto Sordi and the subtly inflected direction of Nanni Loy (The Four Days of Naples), Why is a comedy that smiles like a razor.

Giuseppe Di Noi (Sordi), on vacation with his wife and two young children, is asked to step into the customs office at the Italian border, "a mere formality" that accelerates from terror to nightmare to catastrophe. Di Noi is charged with manslaughter, the victim a German named Franz Katlenbruner of whom he has never heard. He is transported all over Italy while his wife trails after him with the family camper, trying unsuccessfully to learn something specific about the case against him. Even when Di Noi, after weeks of imprisonment, is finally allowed to see a prison official, he bungles the interview. Di Noi requires a lawyer. The one he chooses is so incompetent that for another client, one of Di Noi's fellow prisoners, he draws a severe sentence on a minor charge, driving the prisoner to suicide. After this and accidental implication in a prison riot, Di Noi slips into despair and madness.

The movie is rather abrupt and disconnected, partly because that is the nature of Di Noi's trial, but also because Director Loy too often seems eager to get his character through the course. Sordi's face is India rubber, his body a whole silent vocabulary of bewilderment. He is a grand master of the single, perfect gesture that cannot only shape a scene but punctuate it. Addled after submitting to a quick series of police mug shots, Di Noi is asked for his "other profile" and hastily turns the back of his head to the camera. Protesting his innocence during the cell-block rebellion he is brained by a zealous guard, and shrugs in bewilderment even as he falls to the ground. After Di Noi is finally acquitted and released, still fearful and partly insane, he is waiting with his family at the border to try to begin the vacation again. He plunges his fingers around in a cigarette pack with the eagerness and frustration of a child reaching into a fishbowl to catch a guppy. Retrieving the cigarette and putting a match to it becomes in Sordi's skillful hands the sort of small victory on which a whole new life is built.

Why is a series of such miniature combats, of ironies and outrages made acute because they are so palpably possible. Di Noi is too self-effacing for an Everyman, too funny for a Job. He is only ordinary, but through Sordi and Loy he is remarkably and indelibly so.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.