I’m always moaning about how difficult it is to see Monica Vitti’s Italian comedies in the UK – and now the British Film Institute here has devoted an entire season (Monica Vitti: Creative Force) to her films! Buying tickets for the BFI is pricey as hell, so I could only pick one (and I’d already seen 1968’s La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with the Pistol)), so I opted for Teresa la ladra (Teresa the Thief) (1973) on Tuesday night. It was an evening of diva worship – Italian style!
A prime example of commedia all'italiana, it’s an earthy, raffish slice of life picaresque following the titular thief and jailbird Teresa (Vitti) from her impoverished rural girlhood to the hardships and deprivation of Italy during and after WWII to old age. (Of her father, Teresa recalls almost admiringly, “When he hit you, he REALLY hit you!”). Living by her wits, the cheerful, resilient and amoral Teresa survives as a petty criminal (burglar, pickpocket, seller of contraband cigarettes).
Unexpectedly, there are parallels with John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974). Teresa is for Vitti what Dawn Davenport was for Divine: a charismatic, bad girl criminal anti-heroine. When Teresa burgles apartments, she even has two female accomplices, just like Dawn’s sidekicks Chiclet and Concetta.
There’s a nice running gag where Teresa and her female cohort lure men to the cinema and steal their wallets while they’re distracted. The movie is always Waterloo Bridge (1940): Teresa is entranced by it but never gets to see how it ends. The tone is mostly larky, except towards the end when Teresa is sectioned in a mental institution and it turns harrowing. “I was livid with hunger and passion!” Teresa exclaims at one point, and Vitti makes you believe it. (The penniless Teresa is famished much of the time and wolfs down food as opportunity arises). Picking up where her forebear Anna Magnani left off, Vitti is magnetic throughout: she narrates in her inimitable husky voice and gets multiple dreamy close-ups (those green eyes!).
Director Carlo Di Palma’s storytelling is shaggy and episodic in a good-natured way. And he sure knows how to artfully compose a shot: watch for the gorgeous sequence at a party where Teresa is surrounded by drunk revelers and completely oblivious as we watch her feckless husband and his mistress sneak out and abandon her in the background. By the end, I’d convinced myself not only could I speak fluent Italian but that I WAS Italian!
