Il Sorpasso (1962)

It is 1962, and Italy is enjoying an economic miracle. Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso takes this boom for a spin down the Via Aurelia, and the scenery is entirely white, entirely Italian, and entirely unconcerned with the categories that occupy the modern classification apparatus. Bruno Cortona drives a Lancia Aurelia like a man fleeing his own biography. Roberto, a timid law student, is along for the ride. The sun is relentless, the convertible is loud, and the moral accounting is deferred until the final reel. What follows is a road comedy that ends in a corpse, which is the commedia all'italiana way.

The film's social conscience is faint and diffuse. There is a monsignor to be bribed, an industrialist named Bibi purchasing a fifteen-year-old bride with patience and a checkbook, and a nouveau riche texture that Risi observes without indictment. This is satire by ambient suggestion, not thesis. Bruno's womanizing is presented as appetite, not ideology. Women drift through as objects of pursuit or fixtures of domestic disappointment. Nobody in the frame is analyzing power, and the film would be baffled by a request to do so.

What remains is craft. The reckless overtaking of the title builds to a fatal swerve, and Risi delivers the moral through a shattered car and a man who cannot remember his dead friend's surname. No sermon, no lesson, just the easy life collecting its bill. Viewed through the lens of contemporary cultural markers, the film registers almost nothing. It is a relic of a specific national moment, morally curious, formally assured, and utterly indifferent to the anxieties of a later era. We classify it, and it shrugs. A quiet, cruel, wonderful thing, and no use to us at all as a document of present-day virtue. The sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle.

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