My Friends (1975)

Amici miei arrives from 1975 like a bottle of Chianti pulled from a cellar, and it has aged into something the current cultural vocabulary cannot process. Four middle-aged Florentines (a count without money, a journalist, an architect, a café owner) spend the film orchestrating elaborate practical jokes at the expense of their wives, passing strangers, and a pensioner who steals croissants. The women are nags or mistresses. The one love interest of consequence turns out to have psychological problems, which the film delivers as a punchline and then abandons. Nobody on screen is anything but white, Italian, and male, and nobody involved seems to have registered this as a deficiency, because in 1975 it was not one.

There is a flicker of class resentment in Count Mascetti, an impoverished noble who keeps up appearances he cannot afford and treats his underage mistress as a standing household expense. The joke is on aristocracy, melancholy and affectionate, not on the arrangement of wealth itself. The film has no interest in instructing anybody. It shows, and it lets the showing be enough. The final sequence, in which the friends inform a gullible mourner that their dead companion was executed as a mafia traitor and then dissolve into laughter at the funeral, is the entire ethic in miniature: no lesson, no moral, no apology offered to anyone.

This comedy predates the whole apparatus of contemporary cultural accountability and would fail every audit to which it was submitted. It is also very funny, a fact the auditors would record without enthusiasm. We classify it accordingly: a relic, unrepentant, and entirely at peace with what it is.