Soul of Beauty

By Frank Rich

A SPECIAL DAY Directed by Ettore Scola Screenplay by Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola and Maurizio Costanzo

Sophia Loren turns up in worthy screen roles so infrequently that it's easy to forget just how luminous an actress she can be. A Special Day revives one's fondest memories of her talent. This somber Italian film--yet another meditation on the Mussolini era--gives Loren her richest part in years, and she responds in kind. Not only is she as beautiful as ever at 43, but her beauty seems inseparable from the soul of her performance. When Loren addresses the camera with this much intensity, no audience in its right mind would dare turn away.

A Special Day is not always equal to the gifts of its star, but it is an elegantly designed film that offers original insights into a historical chapter that has already been examined exhaustively by such Italian directors as Wertmuller, Bertolucci and Visconti. Essentially a two-character drama, the movie is set on the May day in 1938 when all of Rome turned out to rally for Hitler. Loren and her most durable costar, Marcello Mastroianni, play the only tenants of a cavernous apartment building who remain at home during the festivities. Antonietta, an ignorant working-class housewife, has stayed behind to clean up the cramped flat she shares with her boorish husband and six kids. Gabriele, a bachelor who is an out-of-work radio announcer and antiFascist, has shut himself in to contemplate his certain confinement by il Duce's henchmen.

Antonietta and Gabriele have little in common except their loneliness, but they meet and become fast friends. Their relationship soon provides the film makers with an excuse to explore the sexual underpinnings of Fascist ideology. As the downtrodden Antonietta falls in love with the sensitive Gabriele, she suddenly begins to question the macho ethic of her tyrannical husband. She senses, too, that there may be a correlation between her miserable married life and the authoritarianism of Mussolini's Italian state. Even though Gabriele eventually reveals himself to be a homosexual, Antonietta takes him to bed. Having discovered freedom, the heroine must sample it while she still has the chance.

Moving as this story often is, the film suffers from compression. In the effort to confine the action to a single day, the screenwriters lean on stagy plot contrivances that are endemic to old-fashioned plays. Mastroianni's performance adds another synthetic note: this fine actor works hard, but seems miscast as a defeated and dejected homosexual.

Still, Director Scola (We All Loved Each Other So Much) does much to redeem these flaws with his evocative film making style. He infuses his apartment-house setting with a threatening feeling that recalls De Chirico's art as well as the character of Fascist architecture; he floods the sound track with a blaring radio broadcast of the off-screen Hitler rally. Ultimately, A Special Day's apocalyptic atmosphere provides the perfect backdrop for its star's performance. When Antonietta seizes her moment of passion in this frigid world, Loren's warmth can--and does--burn up the screen.--Frank Rich

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