I love Ettore Skola’s films and have watched many of them, and I saw one of his later films, Concorrenza Sleale, 2001. The film takes place in Rome in the late thirties. The two entrepreneurs running the shops next door are competing all the time. One of them - Umberto (Diego Abatantuono) focuses on more wealthy customers, he has an
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I love Ettore Skola’s films and have watched many of them, and I saw one of his later films, Concorrenza Sleale, 2001. The film takes place in Rome in the late thirties. The two entrepreneurs running the shops next door are competing all the time. One of them - Umberto (Diego Abatantuono) focuses on more wealthy customers, he has an atelier where he is engaged in sewing clothes, in addition, he sells fabrics. Leone (Sergio Castellito) sells ready-made and not very expensive clothes, and therefore he has more customers. Umberto is more emotional, often loses his temper, sometimes it comes to a fight with Leone. They seem to be enemies. However, their youngest sons are very friendly, play together, go to school together. We still see some of their relatives, the son of Umberto, who is studying to be an architect, is in love with Leone’s daughter, who learns to play the piano and makes progress, brother Umberto Angelo (Gerard Depardieu) is a teacher at school, sometimes speaks quite critically about the current state of affairs, the brother of his wife Umberto is a terrible slacker who does not work anywhere and sits on the neck of his sister’s family, then he will become fascists. But gradually the atmosphere begins to change, Mussolini, whom the people often vilify in everyday life, begins to “befriend” Hitler and gradually adopts some of his methods, including in relation to the Jews, and then we learn that the Leone family turns out to be Jews. Persecutions begin to gradually affect them – first, receivers are taken away, then children are forbidden to study in general schools, then licenses for activities are taken away, etc. All this happens gradually, and here we see that Umberto, unlike some, does not support this kind of policy at all and he and Leone even become friends, Umberto considers such actions unfair competition. But the matter is taking an increasingly serious turn, despite the fact that some believed that in Italy, due to their peculiar attitude to the laws, it will not come to this. There was even a Jew who had come there from Germany just in the hope that Italy was not very lawful, but he was eventually interned, though he hoped to go to America. So the Leone family closes their shop, because the Jews are deprived of licenses for activities, and goes to the Roman ghetto to his mother, by the way, this ghetto was not organized under Mussolini, it had ancient roots, was organized in the 16th century. How things turn out next, we'll never know. But the story is conducted as if on behalf of the younger son of Umberto, who remembers all these events and remembers them, as well as his then best friend. It's not a bad movie, I liked it.
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