Mario Monicelli’s Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo/An Average Little Man opens with a scene of Alberto Sordi — Mafioso — savagely beating a fish to death with a rock and tearing its guts out. This proves to be excellent foreshadowing to a film that lulls you into complacency and then wrenches your psyche with narrative twists that defy simple genre categorization. I should say that there’s no real way to discuss Un Borghese without some kind of spoiler-y talk. Here’s the short version — this is a good movie that you should watch. It might be best to go in blind or only having read the synopsis on IMDB — A meek middle-aged man finally takes justice into his own hands. This both gives you some idea of what you’re in for without preparing you at all for how it unfurls. However if you’ve already seen it or don’t mind a major spoiler — please proceed.
Un Borghese is the story of Giovanni Vilvadi — Sordi — a middle-aged bureaucrat and his son Mario — Vincenzo Crocitti — who is coming of age to enter the workforce. “Meek” is probably an overstatement as Giovanni boasts and fantasizes about Mario’s future success, drives like a man possessed to get to work, and bellows at his long suffering wife played by an wonderful if understated Shelley Winters. While he is willing to be brash around those in his personal life, Giovanni consistently defers to his superiors at the pension office that employs him. In his attempts to secure Mario a position, Giovanni doesn’t hesitate to beg and plead with the officials in his office. He buys them gifts, writes long, adoring letters in Mario’s name, and even joins a masonic lodge in an extended and hilarious scene that most resembles Monicelli’s other strictly comedic films. In fact — for the first hour of run time — Borghese plays out much like other commedia all'italiana. It’s a lightly comic story of a man with ambitions for his son battling bureaucracy and a depressed economy.
The shift in tone comes completely without warning in a shocking moment of violence. On their way to the professional exams — Giovanni and Mario encounter a bank robbery and Mario is killed by a stray bullet from one of the thieves. The scene hits like a wrecking ball and is brilliantly executed both in direction and Sordi’s performance. The news of the killing is immediately broadcast and Amalia Vivaldi — Winters — has a stroke and becomes nearly catatonic upon hearing. Giovanni makes some attempts to proceed according to law and custom — he cares for his ailing wife, he cooperates with police, he accepts the condolences of his colleagues — but the undercurrent of failing systems is ever present. During a second police lineup Giovanni declines to identify the murderer. Instead he stalks him — waiting until dark — where he beats him over the head with a tire jack and hauls the unconscious criminal to his fishing cabin.
There is a way a story like this plays out in typical genre fare and you could be forgiven for thinking Un Borghese becomes an Italian Death Wish knock off but Monicelli is working with more subtlety than that. While the failure of systems is a major theme throughout the film — Giovanni does not get catharsis by working outside of them. This is a deeply pessimistic story and the finale is more tragic than it is thrilling. Part of what makes Monicelli’s work here so fascinating is how disparate elements of comedy, tragedy, genre, and even nihilism are blended together. While the second half of the film is decidedly darker — it’s not without absurdity. One of the more memorable scenes is at a cemetery where Giovanni is now looking for an appropriate resting place for Mario — mirroring his search for a position with the pension office — and he’s told again that he must be patient and that they’re doing all he can. He’s then led to a kind of warehouse where all the coffins of all the people awaiting burial are stacked on top of each other. It’s a chaotic scene of wailing and confusion and disinterested forklift operators that Giovanni takes in with resignation. Unable to toss flowers onto the coffin of a loved one, a grieving woman simply states that it doesn’t matter. It’s a tragic scene that is darkly comedic and hopeless all at once.
Both Monicelli and Sordi are comedic masters with a gift for portraying everyday Italian life and those facilities are certainly on display in Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo. However this film is a savage indictment of a society in decline — faltering systems and economic anxiety with no refuge offered by religion or philosophy. It is very much in line with the pessimistic sentiment of the poliziotteschi even if it doesn’t offer similar action thrills. It’s a beautifully executed film with some marvelous performances. Winters is perhaps underutilized — she’s dubbed over in Italian as was common — but she has a couple of excellent scenes of anguish and frustration. Sordi’s long expressive face is the perfect and perhaps only canvas to express the complex blend of sentiments contained in Un Borghese. I’m uncertain of how appreciated it was outside of Italy in 1977 — it won several Italian film awards at the time — but it certainly seems underseen today. It would make an excellent candidate for a Criterion edition to go along with some of Monicelli’s other films like The Organizer and Big Deal on Madonna Street.
Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo can currently be found on rarefilmm and I highly recommend checking it out: http://rarefilmm.com/2017/12/un-borghese-piccolo-piccolo-1977/
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