Critics reviews

While we often celebrate post-war Italy's cinema—the neorealist films about the everyday malaise, the hustle, and the struggle of the common Italian by the likes of Visconti, Rossellini or De Sica—we tend to overlook the equally masterful comedies that emerged later. Italy's prolific film industry was at an all-time high in the early 60s. Amidst these wonderful films, Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life) is a delightful example of a commedia all'italiana.

A high point of the genre during this period is undoubtedly Risi's Il sorpasso(The Good Life, 1962). Featuring Gassman in one of his most accomplished performances and iconic roles, the film is a profoundly amusing but also disturbing portrayal of the euphoric cynicism generated by the economic "boom".

Il sorpasso is one of the jewels in the crown of the genre (we use the term tentatively here) known as commedia all'italiana, which more often than not devoted itself to charting the vicissitudes of a culture experiencing rapid modernisation and the eventual disillusion that resulted... Il sorpasso is an ever-moving canvas of the ebb and flow of the life of a nation over two summer days on the road.

Il Sorpasso" is typically described as a road film (and has been cited as an influence on the making of "Easy Rider"), as well as a founding example of the internationally popular social farces branded "commedia all'Italiana." It is both of those, as well as an intermittently lubricious travelogue, a deliberately nerve-racking morality play and an exercise in cinematic velocity that for its first hour spends as much time inside a moving car as anything before Abbas Kiarostami.

The shocking and sudden ending was extremely courageous for the time, but spectators accepted it because of the consequent painful moral longing: it is an unavoidable tragic conclusion that shows an easy life doesn't exist. A moralist with few illusions, Risi knew very well that the reason only Roberto should die is that Bruno has yet to begin really living. He knew the verse of the poet Umberto Saba: "It's thinking about death that at the end helps us to live.

Unlike some of the more revered films of the time, Il Sorpasso is genuinely amused by the frivolity it depicts, and Bruno's behavior is every bit as charming as it is vile (and it gets pretty vile). Satirical but never scolding, the movie is entertaining because Risi understands the importance of having fun. It's enduringly great because he also understands that no one is having enough of it.

Like the fast sports car that roars through the streets of Rome in the opening, Il sorpassocharges at a delicious pace from start to finish, each scene uncovering new landscapes, sardonic ironies, and oddball secondary characters while adding layers of nuance to its two principals. This miraculously entertaining film has lost not a whit of contemporaneous zing in the half century since its 1962 release.

You'll recognize every road movie from Sideways to Boratand The Hangover in this impulsive summer drive—a quest for fun. In their own obnoxious way, Bruno and his unwitting student sidekick, Roberto (Trintignant, stunningly youthful), have come to exert a colossal influence on modern-day movies. It's a film that leavens the cruising and carousing with a fair share of internal reflection. Yes, the frame is filled with the era's bikini-clad pulchritude, but the fuel here is primo neurosis.

It's the director's ambition to make this small-fry setup into a bigger zuppa di pesce that mostly falls flat. As a dual character study, the script... is over-determined... Il Sorpasso's third act feels much more forced than its lightweight boys-at-play journey, never more so than in an unearned tragic finale. Early '60s Rome comes across vividly, but the two leads can't quite sell the heavy-handed irony as truths about masculine character, as Risi intends.