After almost thirty years, Paolo Virzì brings the Molino and Mazzalupi families back to Ventotene. On March, 7 Un altro ferragosto (Another Mid-August Holiday) was released. It is the sequel of Ferie d’agosto (August Holidays), the Livorno-born director’s first great success, which won the David di Donatello as best film in 1996. The two families, expressions of opposing cultures in a decade of great transformation, find themselves spending their holidays side by side, soon coming into conflict.
Among the rocks and the Mediterranean scrubland, many characters return, but others do not. Ruggero and Marcello, played by the late Ennio Fantastichini and Piero Natoli, are not present in the new edition.
Life on the island has changed, or it has only been caught up with the present: apps, influencers and gender fluidity have arrived; ideals disappear, embodied now only by a tired and ill Sandro Molino (Silvio Orlando). Meanwhile, the contrast between Berlusconism and anti-Berlusconism has given way to a different one, between nationalism and Europeanism. In the sequel, ample space is given to recalling the experience of the exiles and the Ventotene Manifesto, in which the anti-fascists Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni prefigured a united Europe.
Once again, the holidays are the expedient with which the cinema tries to narrate the Italians and their transformations. Virzì’s two films have done so, but also, even within a different genre, those of Carlo and Enrico Vanzina, in particular the Vacanze di Natale series. The brothers wrote and directed only two episodes, the 1983 original and the 1999 remake. The cinepanettoni phenomenon, in fact, is to be attributed to Aurelio De Laurentiis, who understood that ‘in the name of seriality he could exploit that trend’, as Enrico declared in an interview with Agi last December.
Virzì’s Ventotene and Vanzina’s Cortina d’Ampezzo are very different holiday contexts. Both, however, suffer the evolution of mass tourism in the same way.
The Tyrrhenian island, unknown a few decades ago if compared to neighboring Ponza, is no longer the rustic paradise of Ferie d’agosto. “Small but gangly,” as Marcello says. The farmhouse of Sandro Molino and his friends has now electricity and the island no longer hosts only those who seek a more immediate contact with nature. Rosario with his notebook renting out the cottages is not there anymore, but his daughter Irene -who runs a modern, computerized chain of B&B- took his place. Even the film festival organized by Mauro in the sequel, as lame as it is, gives an idea of the initiatives that many carry out to try to attract a more cultured and upscale tourism. The Ventotene Film Festival really exists and is now in its 28th edition.
The Vanzina’s Pearl of the Dolomites, in the two films sixteen years apart, continues to be the realm of grand hotels and, for older frequenters like the Covelli protagonists, family ‘winter palaces’. Cortina, however, appears increasingly entangled in a vicious circle of appearance that everyone wants to be a part of. Exemplary is the story of the two young Bolognese Paolo and Roberto in Vacanze di Natale 2000, who pass themselves off as heirs only to impress girls who, in the most classic of misunderstandings, are also lying about their identities. The fame of the resort gradually merged with that of the film, which over the years has become a cult. This culminated in the celebrations last December for the 40th anniversary of the film.
These works also speak of Italian families, whose tensions often reach their peak during the holidays. Enlarged, restricted, affectionate and hypocritical, increasingly diverse. The Molinos are already atypical in 1996, with fathers called by name and mothers rediscovering themselves as homosexuals. They are only enriched by an ‘unresolved relationship between a father and a son (Sandro and Altiero), made up of knots that have never been untangled and of an even painful misunderstanding’, as the director declared. While the Mazzalupi family, from being the most classic ‘unhappy family’ of those who also take their grandmother on holiday, as their daughter Sabrina says in tears, expands in the attempt of compensating for mourning and pain.
What Virzì and Vanzina have in common, however, seems to be the desire to bring Italians face to face with themselves and with the mental closure that separate them from each other, from the ‘man next door’, as the adolescent Ivan observes in Ferie d’agosto.
Mario Marchetti (Claudio Amendola) and his parents in Vacanze di Natale – accompanied in every appearance by Venditti’s ‘Grazie Roma’ – and the Mazzalupi family, are similar to each other and to many other Italians: small shopkeepers who have ‘worked hard’, have ‘taken satisfaction’ and feel ‘inferior to no one’, as Ennio Fantastichini says in the fake talkshow scene in Virzì’s first film. In spite of this, the two families from southern Rome, eager to break away from the routine of Ovindoli, Nettuno and Santa Marinella, are victims of an elitist prejudice that sees them as strangers to those resorts.
“In August of ’81 there were 11 of us here. Now Ventotene is over,” says Roberto in Ferie d’agosto, a non-government globetrotter and Don Juan fricchettone played by Gigio Alberti. He also repeats this in this year’s sequel to some girls, for whom, however, thanks to his white hair and greater sensitivity on the subject, he turns out to be just a drooling old man. “Excuse me, but if the Torpigna (editor’s note: from the working-class neighbourhood of Torpignattara), after invading Piazza di Spagna,’ the aristocratic Mrs Covelli complains disconsolately, ‘invade Cortina too, then I don’t know, let’s sell the house and amen’. Human types as distant as solar systems, but united by nostalgia for a time when ‘only we used to come here’.
