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Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant "Il Sorpasso"
a movie by Dino Risi, 1962
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— Air is changing. It is clear that it is changing. Someone has smelled that the air is changing and are organizing themselves to determine more favourable conditions. A new wind will sweep this system away.
— What do you mean Onorevole?
— That Craxi with Sigonella has reached the highest point in Italian foreign policy. Americans for sure want to retaliate against him. He will not go very far, our Bettino.
— But does Craxi know it?
— Well, I think he's aware of it.
— Perhaps they are looking for new interlocutors in this country…
— It is possible. It is possible that the communists have become more credible than us. We have focused too much on a pro-Palestinian policy.
That evening Silvano returned home full of presentiments about the future of his party and fears about his own future.
— I have to change job.
— Why? — Sabatina asked him.
— I want to start an insurance company.
— You want what? For years you were deaf. Socialism, Socialist party, Craxi…. And now you come out with a change.
— The times are no longer the same, Sabatina.
— What do you mean?
— I mean, our world is going to end, to decay. Another world is about to be brought up, that will no longer be ours. Perhaps it will be that of Luigi and Fabrizio. Perhaps Luigi will be able to go through it better than Fabrizio, Fabrizio is like you. He has no courage. I'm worried about questo ragazzo. What will he do when we're gone?
Sabatina was silent. She did not understand where Silvano was headed to. But she felt that this time Silvano was right. She sensed that too. She felt that it was no longer what she once felt. Something was rusty, broken, corrupt, rotten in the world that had accompanied them for almost seventy years.
Luigi, for example, how has he changed! Since he had met Maria. Since the days he was engaged with Maria. After the marriage above all. He had become quiet, sometimes speechless, he talked little and never about his personal life. He was no longer the talkative child she had given birth. He was a different one. And sometimes he was kind of intimidating her, but he was the eldest child whom to be confident and ask for when she had to make decisions.
Fabrizio even though he had a family and although he had two daughters, had his head in the clouds, was a dreamer, a daydreamer. He had not done much in his life. He didn’t finish the university. And above all he had wanted to marry that woman, who would only make him suffer. He was stubborn. Una testa dura. Sabatina had told him when Monica, the first daughter, was born not to marry that woman.
"Acknowledge the child but don’t marry her. She is not the woman for you. "
Silvano began to show that he was suffering a structural failure. He was not as good as a few years ago. Sometimes he was silent. He sat in armchair and seemed to sleep but did not sleep. From time to time he would shake his head like his mother Ida. He seemed older. He had put on weight and under his chin it was as if he had two chins because of the fat that was rolled up.
And she, Sabatina, did not want to admit it, but she knew she had become intolerant. And she vaguely felt that she no longer loved the man who had hurt her so many times. Too many betrayals, too many lies.
— Sabatina! Silvano had left his torpor.
— What is it?
— Do you know what Moro said?
— No.
— That we lived in a country of deep passion and fragile structures.
— What do you mean?
— That does not seem like that anymore. It seems to me that we now live in a liquid world, where structures are no longer there but only waves that move you from here now and beyond and we cannot get out of the vortex in which those waves have precipitated us.
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