Bouquet of Splendour

— I’m not a major film buff or anything like that, but who doesn’t enjoy a good classic film? You might remember how I love the film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders and how that led me to Perfect Days, which I also love. And because the universe is generous sometimes, I was led from these films to being asked to look at Young Ali. (Trailer). Anyway, we recently watched A Special Day, 1977, Criterion Collection. — Deborah Young on the Criterion site says in an essay: “Though not quite a love story, it perversely plays on the auras of two long-­standing icons of screen romance, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, turning the audience’s desire for cinematic passion upside down. Who could have imagined the glamorous Loren playing a mousy hausfrau in an old robe and slippers, or Mastroianni, the prototypical Latin lover, as a gay intellectual? Only in an Italian comedy, perhaps, is the combination thinkable—but A Special Day is no comedy.”— Definitely not a comedy. The everyday…