By train, by car, on foot … Eight films to get you on the road

MORNING LIST

Travel beyond a radius of ten kilometers prohibited, curfew at 7 pm … Sanitary measures isolate us, restrict horizons. To escape, all that remains is the cinema and its road-movies, which scroll the kilometers and promote meetings.

So let’s go by car to Tuscany in the company of Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, let’s go south with four sacred lads, offer us a crossing of the United States on a motorbike, take one-way trips to Paris, from Dakar or Germany.

“Le Fanfaron” (1962): trivial odyssey from Rome to Livorno

In deserted Rome, on a scorching August 15, Bruno, a boastful stranger, megalomaniac and flirtatious (brilliant Vittorio Gassman) leads Roberto (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a shy student encountered by chance, on an improvised car ride. The journey will take them, in a few hours, to various places, from family trattorias on Via Aurelia to dance halls and crowded beaches on the Tuscan coast, passing by the young man’s family home and that of the ex-wife. of his traveling companion.

If indecision as to the comic dimension of what is shown or the addition of moments at the end of which it has become impossible to laugh are all definitions of Italian comedy, then we can easily understand how The Fanfaron, which Dino Risi produced in 1962, is one of the founding models of the genre.

Inspired, according to the filmmaker, by a real character – an exuberant lawyer friend who would have taken him on endless car tours in search of hypothetical restaurants and fine dinners at the Prince of Lichtenstein’s house – the film x-rays him. Italy of the economic miracle and, already, the deadly and nihilistic dimension of the transformations of the transalpine society of the time.

Bruno takes Roberto on a trivial odyssey, which will condense all the qualities at the same time: that of disenchantment, of an awakening of consciousness, of a return to a past brutally perceived as a fantasized memory – “Each of us has a false image of childhood”, Roberto will observe – and, finally, of an encounter with fate. Jean-Francois Rauger

“Le Fanfaron”, Italian film by Dino Risi. With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Vittorio Gassman, Catherine Spaack. (1 h 45). On LaCinetek, FilmoTV.

“Easy Rider” (1969): men and choppers

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