Bernardo Bertolucci directed Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Italian: La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo), starring Anouk Aimée and Ugo Tognazzi, who was awarded the Best Actor Award at the 1981 Cannes Film Fest.
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Primo Spaggiari, a small cheese factory worker from Parma, is of peasant origin. He did not go beyond elementary school; he is a self-made man.
His wife Barbara, on the other hand, is a refined woman of French origin.
One day, their son Giovanni is kidnapped by some terrorists and Primo has to raise a billion of lire for the ransom. Meanwhile, the dairy he owns is hit by a serious economic crisis.
A young worker, Laura, Giovanni’s girlfriend, and a worker priest, Adelfo, who know about the kidnapping, intervene. Primo learns from them that his son has died.
Primo, however, continues to collect the money, helped by his wife, to save his second creature: the factory, on the verge of bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the police chief thinks that Giovanni has orchestrated his own disappearance in order to extract money from his father for left-wing anarchists. He may or may not be right.
Following a false letter, written by Giovanni’s girlfriend, the couple deposits the ransom money in the indicated place.
The sudden reappearance of Giovanni means that, in the end, the billion is invested in the dairy, transformed into a cooperative company, under the control of the workers.
At the time, the story of what may or may not have been a terrorist kidnapping was making the headlines of Italian newspapers, which made the movie more relevant.
The ending is like a puzzle, challenging viewers to perceive a modern-day parable about a son who dies and is reborn.
In this respect, the film offers a political meditation on the generation gap.
Bertolucci saw the film as a spiritual sequel to 1900, his 1976 epic about the struggle between Marxism and Fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. Primo could be seen as the continuation of the earlier movie’s Marxist hero, Olmo (Gérard Depardieu)–the aging revolutionary now grown rich and content as his world becomes more insular.
Cast
Ugo Tognazzi – Primo Spaggiari
Anouk Aimée – Barbara Spaggiari
Laura Morante – Laura
Victor Cavallo – Adelfo
Olimpia Carlisi – Romola, the palm reader
Vittorio Caprioli – Marshal Angrisani
Renato Salvatori – Colonel Macchi
Ricky Tognazzi – Giovanni Spaggiari
Credits:
Directed, written by Bernardo Bertolucci
Produced by Giovanni Bertolucci
Cinematography Carlo Di Palma
Edited by Gabriella Cristiani
Music by Ennio Morricone
Production company: Fiction Cinematografica
Distributed by PIC Distribuzione
Release date: February 12, 1982 (US)
Running time: 116 minutes
