That Marcovaldo by Nanni Loy

He looked like a friendly grizzly bear, wrapped up in a thick woolen scarf and waddling a bit. It was Nanni Loy as Marcovaldo. The 1970 Rai drama, directed by Giuseppe Bennati, embarked on the difficult task of bringing the flourishing intelligence of Calvin’s page to the small screen. Challenge won by making Marcovaldo’s daily life into audiovisual narration. He, an employee of the SBAV company, all taken up with a busy and messy coming and going in the fog. He who dreamed of the countryside like the lost Eden and in the city he pursued the fleeting traces of a nature that was increasingly retreating. Candid and acute, that TV Marcovaldo always fell to his feet. He attempted prize games, paraded through the aisles of the supermarket pushing a full trolley, juggled the enticements of the boom. Torn between enthusiasm and skepticism, he pursued the fallacious mirage of the consumer society while maintaining an intimate grace, a serene gaze that mended, smoothed out, healed. He found the crux of lopsided situations by spying on the world with curious eyes.

The intermittences of contemporaneity caressed it without compromising it. They didn’t affect his underlying optimism. His essence remained disorganized and constructive, messed up and very reasonable. To go to work Marcovaldo crossed the city as if gliding along a prearranged route, almost the one that winds along a track for toy cars. The invisible magnet of his routine irresistibly attracted him, from morning to night, composed his life with integrated, assimilated rituals. Despite the troubles, despite the misunderstandings, despite the Laurel and Hardy comic interludes. Marcovaldo’s trick was to always start over again with the precision and stubbornness of an ever-renewed habit. Marcovaldo is very similar to us in this new proposal to the life of every single dawn. In this reborn to monotony. The screenplay had captured the protagonist’s secret code of routine. He had made it an essential reading key. Dry, clean, rigorous in its own way. Marcovaldo worker and wife and father of him was sumptuously housed in a basement, he struggled with life lightly and melancholy. He threw himself headlong into the fray and invariably withdrew from it stunned and amazed, incredulous of such a crash, of such uninterrupted noisy animation.

Marcovaldo fumbled in vain in search of some clean air, a segment of clear sky. Of an oasis of peace and freedom. His anguish could even become acute, suffocating, almost primitive. And the spectator was infected with this claustrophobic affliction of him. He felt, suddenly, a prisoner with him. And with him, from the glass of the windows, he peered at the indifferent and distant sky and mournfully questioned the gray clouds. Those who followed the screenplay would get lost with Marcovaldo in the miracle of a flowering branch or a small group of clandestine mushrooms. He marveled in amazement and gratitude for the prodigy of little things. Nanni Loy showed her large, rough, enchanted, perplexed face, and she built her character making it much more than a role to adhere to. She used short, well-chosen strokes. Of accents that escaped, of interrupted gestures, of amazement without words. A communicative breathlessness that sometimes, tragically, remained without an outlet. His was an internal working which he could not but involve in a movement of sincere empathy, of sincere friendship, in an impulse of participation in the tragicomic deeds of that big, fat and deluded poor man, perpetually ensnared by strange and at times surreal anguish, lost in a maze of stumbles and misunderstandings, gaffes and slips. The Marcovaldo case was a microcosm of the broader underlying discourse. Of the vast criticism of society as a whole. It was known and transpired in this little story that seemed to concern only him. Marcovaldo shaking his big head desolately and wrapping himself in his scarf to start another day.