Avanti! (1972)

Coming at the beginning of what would become Billy Wilder's least successful period, Avanti! Is an utterly charming, lovely film that sadly did not see the success that perhaps it should have. The ALWAYS great Jack Lemmon is Walter Armbruster Jr, a Titan of industry, who arrives on the Italian island of Ischia to collect the remains of his departed father, killed in a car accident while on his annual one month rejuvenation vacation at an Italian spa and resort. Juliet Mills, as Ms Piggott, is an Englishwoman who has arrived with the same task, although it is her mother she has come to claim. When informed by Ms Piggott that his father used his month long sabbatical as an excuse to spend time with his English mistress, Armbruster is crestfallen. How could he reconcile the family man he knew with the man he now sees he really was? Avanti really is about a father son relationship, about how the people we look up to and think we know can and are just as flawed as anyone else. But even those flaws can reveal things, like the true love that existed between the late couple. As Armbruster Jr. wonders how he will get his father home for his lavish funeral that is expected, he begins to realize that what he wants for his father, and what his father really wanted may be two separate things. Along the way, he also comes to terms with his own stifling marriage and his own image as a devoted husband. Will love show him another way? As well as fine performances from the leads, we get an extraordinary performance from Clive Revill as the maitr'e d hotel, Carlo Carlucci, who gets almost all the best lines (and hits them out of the park) to see his performance, and realize it is not an Italian actor, is incredible! Take some time to watch Avanti! Then take some more and watch it again, it really is a wonderful film, and one of Wilder's forgotten gems.

1972. Back in the day when romantic comedies were made in such a way that both sexes could watch them, not just women. Nowadays, when you read "romantic comedy" in relation to the latest formulaic piece of celluloid crap that Hollywood is desperately trying to hype, you can expect garbage; some lame-brained, unfunny mess with Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz mugging like eager-to-please amateurs - should the casting be at its very worst. (Or the amazing non-talents of an Ashton Kutcher and an annoying personality of a La Lopez. The list goes on and on.)A! works because Jack Lemmon isn't a former Mickey-Mouse-Club amateur with a squeaky girly voice, and Juliet Mills isn't a perpetually giggling non-beauty with the body shape of an overgrown pencil. Mills is shapely, curvaceous, charismatic, sexy and pretty, and Lemmon is funny and interesting. There is actual chemistry between them, the story is fun, the gags work, and there is no crude, lewd, low-brow, cheap-ass, teenage approach to sex that we get to see in comedies of recent years, in which having sex is always referred to as "f**king" or "screwing", the F word being a poor substitute for a total lack of inspiration and humour.The only drawback to A! is its length. At well over two hours it does violate somewhat the unwritten rule about comedies and horror films not exceeding 90 minutes. Trust Billy Wilder, that senile old Commie, to have actually made a mention of the Sacco & Vanzetti case. No doubt Billy considered those murdering anarchists as totally innocent. (God forbid a Marxist ever gets punished for anything, even genocide.) Later on, he has an Italian local give the right-arm Nazi salute to the Republican Ambassador. Billy, Billy, Billy, what are we to do with you? Must you include your unsubtle political propaganda even in a harmless little romantic comedy?But if you thought Billy's delusion ended with his extremist politics, think again. He thought that he had injected too much humour into what was meant to be a drama! He stated that they had intended to make a movie more like "The Apartment" (i.e. they wanted it to stink so it could win Oscars). Good thing they "failed", because not only does that vastly overrated movie stink, but I can't imagine how the hell A! could have possibly worked as a drama.The two Wilder movies do have something in common though (apart from Lemmon): both tend to ridiculously idealize women who latch on to (older) married men. Mills's mother was even said to have hidden her poor financial situation from Lemmon's father (the millionaire) because she "loved him", hence that she never received any gifts or financial aid from him. That is so over-the-top stupid that it's almost funny on its own.

(1)The reviewer who titled his review in part "a morally suspect film" was right on target: the film gives tacit approval to cheating on a spouse, the latter who in the film, from snippets of phone conversations from Lemmon's end, seems to be a helpful, loyal wife. (2)No realistic motive underlies the romantic relationship of the two main characters. (3) The film assumes a woman would be happy to be alone 11 months of the year, all for the sake of one annual month with a married man, with no prospect of permanent union. (4)The film relies on cheap gags which in turn depend on totally suspending reality. Some examples: (a) at the time the movie was set in the early 1970s (by its own cultural and political references), passport control at Leonardo da Vinci did not stamp most foreign passports; (b) an American official addressing a corpse in a coffin, swearing it in for duty, is not at all credible; (c) who would believe that a man would calmly substitute the corpse of a stranger for his own father and fly that corpse to the U.S. for a large funeral, while consigning his father's corpse to an Italian cemetery with a headstone bearing a false name--all this, to keep his new-found lover happy? For those reviewers who raved about the musical theme: what theme? There was none. There were varying bits of Italian folk music. At the beginning of the film, in Rome and then in Ischia, I heard some bars which I believe came from the Neopolitan comedic folk piece "Io, Tua Madre e Te" repeated a few times, but that was it. It is no surprise that the play the movie was based on had a very short run on Broadway and that the movie version didn't make a splash. The ONLY realistic descriptions of the Italian mentality were the acceptance of marital infidelity, the tangled bureaucracy, and the willingness to use personal connections to help a friend or a friend or relative of a friend. Everything else supposedly typically Italian was a gross exaggeration. (For whatever it's worth, I have no Italian ancestry, but I lived and worked independently in Italy and have some understanding of a country with many mentalities, depending on the region and on the city and town. The only American film about Italy that I've seen that, to me, had any flavor of accuracy was "A Bell for Adano." All other American films set in Italy are fantasies. If one wants to see a film with some realistic depictions of segments of Italian society, one should see those that are those made by Italians. Not all Italian directors, of course - Cinecittà produces lots of bombs too.)

This movie started off slow and never really picked up from there. It's not unfunny but I never really laughed. But it does kind of warmly welcome you into the lives of the main characters. The plot gently flows. Once you get over being bored or annoyed that it's clearly not nearly as hilarious as it's presumably aiming to be, you become quite attached. The people aren't perfect. But they're people. And it's nice to know you're not alone when it comes to simple things like frustration and getting unpleasant things done. Putting up with things you have no control over.The weird thing is, I feel like I'll fondly recall this movie. The feel of it. It's not the kind of movie I'd watch again anytime soon. Maybe what's so nice about it is that it doesn't try so darn hard to be any one thing in particular. Jack Lemmon will never forget that trip. It wasn't an amazing or incredibly original journey but there was something universal about it. Oddly haunting.The score reminds me of the kind the Italians (Rota and Morricone) used to do all the time. Very beautiful, memorable themes (often waltzes) repeated again and again. I don't know if I'd already heard the music for Avanti! (since it sounded familiar so rapidly) but now it doesn't matter I guess. You'll be humming along just about from the get go.So what's the movie actually about? The unattainable? The unpredictable nature of romance? It is kind of clever since you only see a few characters and yet we get a strong sense of the influence of others. What might have seemed to be a tedious task turns out to be an opportunity for something beautiful and unexpected. He's in another country and he's forgotten how to be free. How to enjoy the random situations he finds himself in. Much too stressed.Can't think of much else to say. The location, the story, everything stays with you. It doesn't hit you, it just eases into your mind over the longish running time. If you want entertainment or "great" film-making look elsewhere. If you want casual company for a few hours, Avanti! You'll remember it like an old friend. Flaws and all.