We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974)

Ettore Scola's 1974 chronicle of three Resistance veterans and the decades that disappoint them remains a patient, rueful piece of commedia all'italiana. The cast is entirely Italian, as the setting and period demand, and there is no modern diversity-conscious apparatus at work. No LGBTQ characters or themes appear. Race is not a subject. Climate is not a subject. Body positivity is not a subject. Neurodivergence is not a subject. The film has other concerns, chiefly memory, compromise, and the slow erosion of political hope.

The women, Luciana and Elide, are given moments of ambition and despair, but the narrative remains a male-friendship chronicle. It observes their suffering without building a feminist argument. The social criticism is older and more Catholic in its guilt. Gianni defends a corrupt real-estate developer, then accepts a bribe. A Socialist politician proves pliable. The Resistance ideal is traded for a mansion and a country estate. This is postwar Italian moral reckoning, not contemporary eat-the-rich rhetoric, though the disgust with wealth is real enough. The film does not reframe history in a modern revisionist key. It mourns a generation that failed its own hopes.

That failure arrives in the final act as a drunken declaration, heavy with political disappointment. The moment lectures a little, but it is still character drama, not a sermon delivered to the audience. Scola's touch is elegiac and dry. He lets the men argue, weep, and lie about being broke. The film's cultural awareness belongs to 1974, not to our current vocabulary. It asks what happened to the partisans after the war. The answer is a long, slow compromise, punctuated by restaurants, quiz shows, and the Trevi Fountain. It is a sad film about friendship and a specific national disillusionment. By the standards of modern social messaging, it is mostly silent. That silence is not a defect. It is simply the film's era and its temperament.