Post-war Italian cinema has been a massive influence on latter day fashion culture, and as such has lined up a heroes’ gallery of likely suspects. There is Antonioni (especially for “Blow Up”), Pasolini (for the formidably transgressive “Salo”), Bertolucci (for the astonishingly chic “The Conformist”), Fellini (for just about everything) and Visconti (again for his entire detail obssesed oeuvre). So when “Boccaccio 70“, a 1962 omnibus film featuring shorts by Fellini, De Sica, Mario Monicelli and Visconti, came across OTM’s desk we expected it to be pretty dusty and dated. Surprisingly enough Boccaccio 70, with the Decameron as its point of departure, turned out to be pretty hilarious and stocked to the gills with insider fashion references. The gem of the quartet? Unquestionably Visconti’s segement “The Job” starring an incandescent Romy Schneider as an hieress facing her playboy husband’s scandalous infidelity. From her opening scene lying languidly on her boudoir floor listening to jazz in a gray tweed Chanel suit with a pink blouse, it’s clear that many a designer have drawn from Schneider’s fashion moments in the film. So fastidious was Visconti that in scence after scene, set design is impeccably matched to Schneider’s outfits, including the infamous gold lame ensemble that seemed to have sparked a whole Prada collection. Covering much of the same territory as Antonioni’s trilogy of “L’Adventura” ,”La Notte”, and “L’Eclisse”: but without the ponderous angst, “The Job” is very much a reference library must have.
Boccaccio ’70 (Remastered Edition) (1962) available at Amazon
