Debut
In the episodic film ‘Se permette parliamo di donne’, unreleased in Spain, the actor played almost a dozen characters
Ettore Scola, one of the most outstanding directors of the last 30 years of the 20th century, made his directorial debut with ‘Se permette parliamo di donne’, an unreleased film in Spain that could be translated as ‘If you allow me, let’s talk about women’, a film of episodes to greater glory of Vittorio Gassman, where he played nine different characters.
Scola, one of the last of a generation of peerless Italian filmmakers. Scriptwriter before director, friend of Federico Fellini, to whom he dedicated his wonderful documentary ‘How strange to be called Federico’, his swan song. Ettore Scola, to whom we owe some great moments on the screen in such fundamental films as ‘A Particular Day’, ‘The Terrace’, ‘The Ballroom’, ‘Macherroni’ or ‘The Family’, was born in Trevico on May 10, 1931, dying in Rome on January 19, 2016. He always used humor to dissect Italian society, sometimes with a very bitter look, always militant.
He studied law at the University of Rome, and from the mid-fifties he dedicated himself to writing scripts, some in collaboration with Ruggero Maccari, and making caricatures and articles -like his admired Federico Fellini-. He collaborated with Dino Risi (‘The Swindler’, 1960; ‘The March on Rome’, 1962, ‘The Escape’, 1972.; ‘Erotika, exotika psicopatika’, 1971), and Antonio Pietrangeli (‘Adua and her friends’, 1960; ‘The girl from Parma’, 1963; ‘The interview’, 1964; ‘I knew her well’, 1964), until in 1964 he made his directorial debut in ‘Se permettete parliamo di donne’.
Scola had been friends with all the Italian performers since his days as a screenwriter, and over the years he would work with all of them. But for his debut he chose one of the greats. Victor Gassman. Along with him, Sylva Koscina, Eleonora Rossi Drago, Antonella Lualdi, Jeanne Valérie, Giovanna Ralli and Walter Chiari complete the cast. We are in 1964. Scola had already decided to debut as a director, and together with his inseparable Ruggero Maccari, they wrote the script for ‘Se permettete parliamo di donne’ with four hands, following the Italian tradition of episodic cinema.
These are nine episodes about love and women, all starring the chameleon-like Vittorio Gassman, who played nine different guys who paraded across the screen: peasants, phonies, johns, nerds, sloths, mugs, cuckolds, ragpickers and, of course, playboys. . All of them portrayed in their relationships with women, all beautiful. Gassman, in his usual facet of showman, faces various adventures in which women are the protagonists, from the prostitute with her willing husband, to the girl who cannot find a place to seclude herself with her boyfriend, from the superstitious Sicilian, to the good lady in search of forbidden emotions, from the insecure woman between two lovers, to the wife of a prisoner who has to justify a child born in the absence of her husband.
The film is shot in Rome, and Scola is committed to indicating that it doesn’t matter so much if we don’t understand women, as long as we can enjoy life with them. A very funny film in which, despite the obligatory reduction of each sketch, it already points to social criticism, which he would develop in his subsequent films. The film opens in Italy on March 28, 1964, and achieves enough success for the writer and director to develop a career solid enough to fill the last decades of Italian cinema.