5 years after the death of Ugo Gregoretti, director, actor and author, his posthumous message, Me, the tube and the pizzas, comes to the cinema, which brings together a compendium of his TV works and a surprise.
Millennials will never be able to know how much we boomers and our parents miss the TV of the past, sometimes innovative and daring, but above all varied, which in addition to staging literary masterpieces in beautiful dramas, produced detective stories, science fiction and a variety of high level. In addition to an instructive and cultural way of making television, which today many would find too serious and “slow” (the word most used by those with no audiovisual culture), he also knew how to give space in the 1960s to innovative characters such as Paolo Villaggio, Cochi and Renato, Paolo Poli, Enzo Jannacci and many others and, on the authorial and directorial side, to figures of the caliber of Nanni Loy And Ugo Gregoretticapable of bringing to the small screen, the first the Italian candid camera, the second class journey on trains which at the time were little different, in terms of convenience, from the military trains, and the second a very entertaining version of the Pickwick Paper, where he entered as a commentator among the fantastic characters of Charles Dickens and his investigations into the most bizarre Italian phenomena. Both were also film directors, with notable results.
Having to tell his story, as the end of his earthly journey approaches, that unstoppable prankster of Ugo Gregoretti chooses to do so, in Me, the tube and the pizzas, which arrives at the cinema only in 2024, five years after his death, through his entertaining television forays into fields that today no one would dare to explore with the same irresistible cheek. Because what characterized the great author, director and occasionally actor, who passed away at the age of 88, was a biting irony, the ability to grasp the comic and the ridiculous in life, without ever looking down on people that he was telling. Because that was Italy and those were the Italians and there was always something to learn. In Me, the tube and the pizzaschosen as a feasible format for his age and physical conditions (the initial project was that of a film based on his book “The story is me”), the formula is that of a walk in Villa Borghese in which, accompanied by his son Filippo Gregoretti and his daughter-in-law Tai Hsuan Huangtakes inspiration from their observations to show some fragments of his very rich career, those that we mentioned before and which make him an (almost) impossible spectator: from the face of Jesus Christ which seems to appear on the wall of a house, surrounded by believers and skeptics, to the ostrich farms that terrorize him, from the unisex Golden Culetti competition, in which he is bored to death but finds a way to converse with a friendly butcher, to the condom factory, from the Erotic Gadgets Fair to the meeting with a very young man Rocco SiffrediStill Rocco Tanoand his father.
Always facetious, curious, with that irrepressible smile that suddenly lights up his gaze and peeks out of the corners of his mouth, Gregoretti shows us the country we used to be, the naive, ignorant but joyful one, in what almost seems like a comment on the one in which we live today, which has remained ignorant (indeed, has become ignorant again) but from which the joy has disappeared. In the end, as further confirmation of how times have changed (at least apparently, given that recommendations still count a lot today for getting a job), he gives us a fragment of his 1962 film I new angelson which at the time Gian Luigi Rondi he wrote: “The new angels are today’s young people, those who, reading certain news, would all seem like teddy-boys or blousons noirs and who instead, seen up close – as today’s film sees them and observes them – although being sometimes too frivolous or too naive, they also manage to be serious people: aware of the new problems of contemporary society”. In young people, moreover, Ugo Gregoretti he had always had faith and it is no coincidence that we, who were at the time of his greatest popularity, understood and appreciated it.
