Kevin Lally on Film

The best film of 2023 (so far) was made in 1961. Let me explain. Dino Risi’s Una Vita Difficile (A Difficult Life) was a critical and popular success in its native Italy, but for some unknown reason was never released in the United States until February 2023—despite the strong track record of contemporaneous Italian imports like La Dolce Vita, Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Divorce Italian Style. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that the film spans two decades and requires some knowledge of Italy’s swirling political currents during that period.

Most helpfully, Rialto Pictures’ invaluable restoration/rescue of this masterpiece from the director of Il Sorpasso begins with new title cards detailing the historic events of that era: the surrender of Mussolini’s successor to the Allies; the liberation of Rome; Italy’s 1946 transition from a kingdom to a republic; the country’s first democratic election in 26 years.

Una Vita Difficile begins during World War II, with more action occurring under the opening titles than in the entire length of some feature films. We’re introduced to Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi), a partisan fighter fleeing the Germans and attempting to take refuge in a hotel near Lake Como. There, he encounters the landlady’s daughter, Elena (Lea Massari), in a fraught situation that’s the polar opposite of a “meet cute.” The two shack up together, then he abandons her to join his fellow freedom fighters.

After the war, Silvio returns to his hometown of Rome and takes a job as a journalist at a struggling newspaper. On assignment in Lombardy, he reunites with an angry Elena, who is appeased once he agrees to bring her with him to live in Rome. (His shabby apartment is the first tip-off that this is never going to be an idyllic union.)

Few films have depicted how tough it can be to make ends meet than in the sequence in which Silvio and Elena, their credit exhausted, are spurned by two different restaurants. This leads to one of the movie’s great comic set-pieces, as Elena runs into an aristocratic friend who invites them to dine at the home of a cantankerous old princess—on the night of the referendum on whether Italy should remain a kingdom. The tensions at the table are Italy’s class conflicts in a microcosm.

Rodolfo Sonego’s script is a series of vignettes depicting how economic struggle and Silvio’s unyielding political principles impact the couple. Silvio is arrested for libel, acquitted, then jailed when chaos returns to Italy following an attempted assassination. He tries to placate his wife and scary mother-in-law by abandoning his plans to write the Great Italian Novel and studying to be an architect. That failed detour leads to the implosion of his marriage.

Thanks to the great Sordi (The White Shiek, I Vitelloni, Mafioso, Il Boom), Una Vita Difficile is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. You both admire Silvio’s justifiable principled stance as a former partisan railing against those who profited from complicity with the Germans and who overlook corruption to line their pockets, and flinch at the way his stubbornness and self-regard hurt his pragmatic wife. An Italian Everyman reminiscent of America’s Jack Lemmon, Sordi plays Silvio as both hero and fool. And matching him every step of the way is the magnetic Lea Massari, who the year before became a star as the woman who goes missing in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura.

A treat for movie buffs is the sequence in which Silvio, encouraged to try to sell his novel to the movies, interrupts the filming of a Roman epic at the famed studio Cinecittà and is shunned by real-life stars Vittorio Gassman and Silvana Mangano (and gently rebuffed by real-life director Alessandro Blasetti). Another high point is Silvio’s drunken rage on a highway outside a nightclub after stalking his estranged wife and being soundly rejected; Risi was so delighted by this tour de force he told Sordi to “Keep going, keep going!”

These and many other scenes have stayed with me many days after catching the film’s premiere run at New York’s Film Forum. How miraculous that one of the very best pictures of Italy’s Golden Age is finally seeing the light of projectors in the United States.

Pictured: Lea Massari and Alberto Sordi. Photo courtesy of Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal. Una Vita Difficile is currently making its way around the United States; see the Rialto Pictures website for playdate details. It returns to New York on May 14 and 17, 2023, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s 25th Anniversary salute to Rialto Pictures.