Oh, Mommy, why?! It is not like this in the world that children are lost. And sometimes getting lost is not just really wanting, but vital. Sooner or later, we all have to leave the parent nest - a pathetic overgrown chick lingering under the mother's wing. He himself is ashamed of his humiliating position, rushes out, suffers. In the end, the inability to break away from the mother becomes so unbearable that it can lead the unfortunate to suicide or death.
Mother 30-year-old Fernando broke his son’s life. The complex, which grew to the size of a malignant tumor of the Oedipus, coupled with the indisputable authority of the mother and her humiliating love, made of an adult man a complexed pervert, stuck in development between 6 and 17 years, looking at the world with the frightened eyes of a trapped fox, emptied with fear. And when the cage is suddenly opened by an elegant female pen and the “baby Didino” for the first time has a chance to escape from the shackles of maternal care, the mother unleashes a real war, as long as her boy always remained with her. Dead or alive.
Frankly, with the words of Luciano Salche and Paolo Villaggio, another movie comes to mind. After all, Salce is responsible for the first part of the immortal saga about Fantozzi, the appearance of which would have been impossible without the brilliant Villaggio, who invented and brought to life the most textbook loser of Italian cinema. This movie is also called a comedy, and I expected to see something with a touch of sadness, but always funny. I didn’t expect that to happen.
This is a cruel, heavy and terrible film, in which the example of one family shows the whole degenerate Italian aristocracy, as well as the tragedy of children studied by many psychiatrists who are unable to break away from their mothers and mothers, who are in love with their children with frightening, unacceptable love that goes beyond the framework of mother-son relations.
It breaks your heart when you see a fully grown man who is manipulated by an imperious and uncompromising mother. It is a shame to look at an old woman who embarks on the most vile and hypocritical adventures to humiliate her son and deprive him of any hope of happiness. It is painful to see this outrageous, unhealthy relationship in which mother and son are either madly in love with each other, or hate each other to the point of being stupid, but certainly not able to understand what they want from each other. It is terrible and unpleasant to look at this love on the verge of incest. I do not want to believe in parental selfishness, which has taken such ugly forms!
Parents are always selfish. So are the kids. Few people can truly love their children. They always expect something from them. Some are extensions of themselves. Others strive through children to achieve successes that they have not achieved themselves, some grow a support in old age, someone just brightens up loneliness. And to see a person in a child, a person - oh, it's harder, not everyone is capable of this. It's much easier to pretend to be sick and dying, so your son sticks out at your bed all day long. But I have witnessed such vile scenes in my life, and mothers at this moment look just disgusting! Like the greatest liars in the world. May God not fear his own mother, who else understands the aspirations of his child, but her? Is it possible to be so stupid and insensitive beast and still be called mother, mother, mother!?
I don’t know why I grow a reflection. Why raise a man at all, teach him anything, only to have him on your leash to his deathbed? Wouldn't it be easier to get a dog? Sometimes it is good for her to walk! It is no wonder that then there are maniacs, psychopaths and murderers born of such excessive parental love. A lot has been written about this and a lot has been filmed. But not always so heartbreaking.
Powerless anger boils in me, a person who, for certain reasons, is familiar with the psychology of childhood behavior. After all, it is really so simple that parents can take and spoil a child, raise a monster, a moral freak or a pathetic amorphous creature, incapable of life, a cadaver who can not rest, a kind of greenhouse plant, a wardrobe item!
Despite the fact that the character of Villaggio in this film is not a very pleasant type, you understand that he is not guilty of any of his disgusting manifestations, that all this is the result of the tireless efforts of his prison mother, and you sincerely sympathize with him and want to escape from this painful captivity of love.
This movie shakes. Fists squeeze themselves, a mass of “why” spins in the head, and hatred boils in the throat. Salche, having opened the abscesses of such a light, seemingly, feeling as motherly love, cut the patient even those who are not directly affected by this problem. It's just that he was telling the truth, and that truth is scarier than a million Jason Voorhees put together. Jason wouldn’t be Jason without his family.
The film was shot in the 70s, until Villaggio was mired in a series of similar farces and clowns, always funny to the point of colic, but exploiting the huge talent of the comedian unilaterally, preventing him from growing, and delaying the actor in development for a dozen years, pushing him off the right path, which he took in such films as this or “I’ll put America in order and come back” – the way of Chaplin.
Behind the external comic picture of this on-screen loser is the bitter and terrible tragedy of a broken fate, serious experiences, a crippled life, broken priorities, confused thoughts and feelings, a wrong attitude, a huge number of complexes and fears, internal contradictions tearing this little man apart - not allowing him not to love his native and such a caring mother, hated for - paradox - this most irresistible love. Perhaps nowhere else have I seen such a broken, so frighteningly humiliated Villaggio, and his comic - seemingly - escapades, played by his hero as an antidote to anger the hated mother - get goosebumps.
Salche proved to be an outstanding expert on human psychology in general and family relations in particular. He proved himself to be a great artist in the construction and presentation to the viewer of this nonlinear, chaotic, very unpleasant and ambiguous plot, in which it is impossible to keep silent, and it seems obscene to say vile things. The director gave a clear picture of a whole group of phobias and complexes associated with the difficulties in the mother-son relationship and gave it with terrifying authenticity.
What's left? Lilya Kedrov as an autocrat mother? I believed her. Eleanor Georgie? She's so beautiful... and so wholeheartedly loved this poor fool. Villaggio. Overnight, jumping from small comic reprises to the most complex genre of tragicomedy, he achieved stunning success here, created images that he will have to catch up many years later with the help of Fellini himself. The finale is tragic and, for all its regularity, deafeningly unexpected. Mom, I'm grateful you don't love me.
10 out of 10