Word: antonietta
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...easily satisfied. One of the last designers whose couture was handmade - his assistants, one of his backers noted, never touched a sewing machine - he relies on his invisible artists, the seamstresses of northern Italy, for the anachronistic grace of his frocks. He designs the dresses; they make them. Antonietta de Angelis, the head seamstress of the house, has some of her boss's imperious temperament. She knows that anything less than perfection is unacceptable, for a master who keeps wanting to improve on it. After designing a perfect white dress, a symphony of subtle movement, he ponders his creation...
...Essentially a two-character drama, the movie is set on the May day in 1938 when all of Rome turned out to rally for Hitler. Loren and her most durable costar, Marcello Mastroianni, play the only tenants of a cavernous apartment building who remain at home during the festivities. Antonietta, an ignorant working-class housewife, has stayed behind to clean up the cramped flat she shares with her boorish husband and six kids. Gabriele, a bachelor who is an out-of-work radio announcer and antiFascist, has shut himself in to contemplate his certain confinement by il Duce...
...Antonietta and Gabriele have little in common except their loneliness, but they meet and become fast friends. Their relationship soon provides the film makers with an excuse to explore the sexual underpinnings of Fascist ideology. As the downtrodden Antonietta falls in love with the sensitive Gabriele, she suddenly begins to question the macho ethic of her tyrannical husband. She senses, too, that there may be a correlation between her miserable married life and the authoritarianism of Mussolini's Italian state. Even though Gabriele eventually reveals himself to be a homosexual, Antonietta takes him to bed. Having discovered freedom...
...recalls De Chirico's art as well as the character of Fascist architecture; he floods the sound track with a blaring radio broadcast of the off-screen Hitler rally. Ultimately, A Special Day's apocalyptic atmosphere provides the perfect backdrop for its star's performance. When Antonietta seizes her moment of passion in this frigid world, Loren's warmth can-and does-burn up the screen.-Frank Rich
Olmi has directed his first feature film with a poetic, slowly-paced delicacy that reminds one of Truffaut; he handles the fumbling love between Domenico and Antonietta with a subdued richness of feeling that characterized the most subtle moments of Chayefsky's Marty. He focuses his camera on countless specks of life which we, as well as his own characters, have hurried past. And a potent, bottled-up vitality swells from under even the most mundane street scene or conversation. Declining the easy gimmicks of wierd camera angles or background music, yet nevertheless infusing his simple story with extraordinary emotional...