It is not useless to think of changing the wrong things, even if you do not succeed (but not said, a little bit always succeeds).
In this little typed sentence, together with the inevitable drawing, on a sheet intended for his daughter Paola, then sixteen years old in an existential crisis, for me there is everything Ettore Scola. There is his confidence in the possibilities of humans, his awareness that wrong things are not a stick with an immutable shape, the awareness that things change, they have changed, they will change. May life be a wonderful work of Sisyphus.
Yes, as in the famous sentence of We had loved each other so much: We wanted to change the world and the world has changed us. But those words can be read as a kind of ambigram. Of course, things have smoothed us out and changed us, perhaps even tamed us. But it is also true that we have not made it in time, we cannot make it in time, to change the world once and for all because it is itself capable of constantly changing and changing us. And he constantly asks us not to give up our desire for something else, for always more.
Ettore, who would have turned ninety on May 10, was a human being of rare beauty. It was a magic potion, made up of things that seem irreconcilable to fools. He was full of civilized passions and gifted with a pure gold sense of humor, he was cultured but deeply popular, he was sly and very tender, lazy and traveler.
This duplicity is also found in his films. Stories of people, minimal stories, but under the roof of major events. Like the noise of Hitler’s visit lived in the solitude of a Roman building in A particular day, the passage of time in the house de The family or in the room of Dancing dancing.
In Scola, heir to the tradition of the greats of neorealism, affects the human condition, especially that of the most unfortunate, in the flow of the collective affair. The protagonists of Drama of jealousy and those of Ugly dirty and bad. In Scola there is more Pasolini than Moravia, more people than bourgeoisie. And so much Zavattini, with his ray of sunshine to illuminate the poor. But even the poor, in his cinema, are never beatified, but told.
Ettore Scola was truly a popular intellectual, he knew and he wanted to make his art meet as many people as possible, he did not divide conscience and language. And he had a great political passion. Which led him to be there, always. And to follow and share, sometimes with pain, all the transformations that have led from the PCI to the Democratic Party.
In the text published here, which he wrote to me in 2007, after the speech of the Lingotto, he returns to the themes that have occupied so much of his life: the battle for a richer and more open cultural life and, in the narrative of time, for a new aesthetic of reality, a theme to which he has dedicated so much cinematographic work and creative.
His gaze turned to young people. He watches them with a mixture of nostalgia and anguish. Sometimes I think about how he would have lived these pandemic days. And I think his greatest anguish would have been precisely for the boys. For which the question contained in this letter is valid: Premature orphans of all faith in tomorrow. If the secret of a good old age is to keep the dreams of youth, what old age awaits the young without dreams?
The letter with which I began this article contained today in the beautiful book Let’s call dad (Rizzoli), written by the daughters Paola and Silvia. He goes on to say: It is not useless to have doubts (certainty useless because it does not ask questions and does not go forward).
Here, today Ettore would have advised doubts. After all, the word that concludes the great story of We had loved each other so much just Boh.
An all and only Italian word.
April 22, 2021 (change April 22, 2021 | 9:01 pm)
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