Fantozzi Against the Wind (1980)

The third entry in the saga of Ugo Fantozzi arrives from 1980, a decade its own narrator greets with talk of progress, innovation and tolerance, a claim the film undercuts within minutes by returning its hero to the same fluorescent misery he has always occupied. Paolo Villaggio directs and stars, and the machinery is familiar: the unlucky clerk, the grinding office, the small humiliations that accumulate into catastrophe. As a document of modern social consciousness, it is a blank page, and it seems untroubled by that fact.

The single thread that registers at all is the film's contempt for the Megaditta and its overseers. The employees pray for the death of the 106-year-old Heir Director and rejoice when rubella finally carries him off. His replacement, Viscount Cobram, forces the entire staff onto bicycles for a punishing race. A later manager invites two accountants aboard his yacht and works them like cabin boys. This is genuine boss-versus-worker material, delivered as slapstick instead of sermon. The film wants us to laugh at the arrangement, not march about it.

Elsewhere the ledger is empty, and in places actively hostile to contemporary sensitivities. Professor Birkermaier's weight-loss clinic exists to mock appetite and flesh, and the running gag about the ugliness of Pina and Mariangela is offered without a flicker of self-awareness. Pina's infidelity resolves itself when her would-be lover announces his disgust at her appearance, and the Southern baker is a regional caricature with a mangled name for our hero. There is no diversity in the cast, no queer subtext, no ecological anxiety, no neurodivergent interiority, no revisionist history. This is a 1980 Italian farce about a man who cannot win, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about anything.