Parenti Serpenti, Monicelli and the dark side of Christmas

Mario Monicelli he has always chosen the least simple route to get to the heart of his works. The comedy, according to his way of understanding the seventh art, had to have a large part of the audience absorbed in smiles and reflections – even biting ones – only to then be disastrously displaced in a vortex of awareness and sense of guilt. According to many, it was Monicelli’s way of doing things convey the concept of melancholy without excessively giving way to condescension.

After years, 15 since his passing, we can safely say that the director born in the Campo Marzio district of nostalgia and guilt didn’t have the slightest worry. His works never claimed to teach anything, if anything they wanted (and want). to make the average spectator face his own atrocities. A sort of catharsis in nemesis: awareness, even an uncomfortable one, amidst the shadows that become reality in the space of a feature film.

Mario Monicelli and the cynical side of comedy

You can laugh, as happens with My friendsone can reflect bitterly as happened with The Marquis del Grillo e A Little Little Bourgeois. Or we can give up, but it always matters only how we choose to do it. Monicelli remembers him in the least conventional way possible, through a work that – even today – resembles a social treatise full of uncomfortable truths and scenic authenticity. It’s about Snake Relativesa film released in 1992, which is defined as one of the director’s most accurate works.

The difference is subtle, but substantial: Monicelli’s best films are probably others. Let’s think about The Brancaleone Army o The Usual Unknownswithout forgetting Popular Novel. Parenti Serpenti, however, is the director’s truest film. A postcard that never turns yellow, for two fundamental reasons: the first is that it gradually destroys all the clichés about the family and the good that populates every nucleus.

Hypocrisy as a muse

He does it without any kind of embarrassment, there is no mediation, the narration of events is aimed precisely at giving the impression of a castle of certainties that slowly crumbles. The second reason concerns hypocrisy: in this work by Monicelli it is a distinctive trait, necessary only and exclusively to make it clear that falsehood – in different ways – is equally inherent in each of us. Especially a Natale.

Monicelli was clear about what psychologists say today and even get paid handsomely: the family is always the source of trauma and deep scarsthere is no escape. Even in the healthiest family relationships there are invisible backstories and plots capable of upsetting everything. The skeletons in everyone’s closet come out, in particular, during the holidays.

The family, a shared prison

At Christmas we are all better, but also more vulnerable. We return, and this is masterfully rendered by the director who grew up in Campo Marzio, into that family ecosystem from which we tend to escape throughout the rest of the year. In Campania it is customary to say that blood is chewed, but not spit out. In the sense that blood ties, especially those with the family, are not rejected but go through situations that often border on what is permitted.

The roles are always well defined, but as time passes, certain dynamics turn into intolerance. Above all because the arrival of adulthood allows those present to no longer wanting to apply the same communication tricks. The result is equivalent to being in the presence of a pressure cooker: anger and indolence rise until they explode in particularly heated arguments and recriminations of various kinds. Monicelli was able to find harmony in a borderline situation, managing to outline – with surgical precision – the dark side of Christmas. Where every panettone or pandoro could potentially hide feelings of guilt and resentment that can affect everyone’s experience.

The Italian province mirrors dissatisfaction

A family, the one told by Monicelli, on the verge of exploding and remaining entangled within an obligatory liturgy like the one that accompanies Christmas. In the background of a Sulmona covered in snow, four children reunite with their respective families and the certainties of an entire life melt away like the candle in the center of the table. The dinner seems to be the perfect portrait of the Italian province: there is the slightly disoriented retired Marshal, the omnipresent and inevitably talkative mother. There is also no shortage of bored grandchildren.

The table, according to Monicelli, is the center of everything: a theatrical proscenium where every mask is destroyed by the harshest reality. Paolo Panelliwhich embodies his last role, is a perfect representation of the forced endurance that everyone is forced to undergo in the name of a quiet life. A concentration of suffering and poorly hidden insolence.

A game of massacre

We move on to the neurotic Cinzia Leone and to the slimy Alessandro Haber (for script needs, of course). The low blows of each are served, between one course and another, as if they were a reinforcement salad. The only thing that is cultivated, however, is the seed of resentment. A triumph of the widespread selfishness that gripped the middle class and today, however, affects the middle-upper class.

A lucid malice that spares no one. Also for this reason Monicelli has developed a cynical humor capable of making a difference. In the same years as Snake Relativesthe cinepanettoni have found prestige. Postcards of the upper class capable of retaining, however, a fairytale component. In Monicelli’s case, however, there is little or nothing fairytale-like. The happy ending, according to the late director, is knowing that in this game of massacre – which in the family they call party – no one is saved.

A sadism that is repeated not out of self-harm, but out of Christian charity and – in some cases – out of duty. Being alone is a risk, but becoming cumbersome – particularly as adulthood sets in – is a certainty that you can’t digest even over a family lunch or dinner. Monicelliamong other things, described the acid reflux of a nation moving on from its most intimate ties. Almost as if it were an “original sin” from which no one can free themselves.