Io la conoscevo benei tells the story of a ditz in 1960s Castellammare. You know, the place all the mobsters came from. The mobstermecca.
She has a dayjob - as an incompetent hairdresser, making piddly squat for jackshit effortii. The owner of the little hairshack is displeased with her performance as a hairdresser. He fucks her naturally, mechanically, as something you kinda have to do to your property, like trimming the hedges say. He's displeased with her performance as a cumrag, also - but that's okay, she's displeased with his, too!
She has a nightjob, too - showing patrons the way into a cinema, along with another ditz. And she's looking for more jobs, which is how some silver tin tongued mortodifame introduces her to an old man from whence she picks up a little job modelling boots - for which she shows up in all the get-up of a dutchess.
She has a boyfriend, of course, a nutty vagabond who asks the waiter to feel up his girlfriend, and takes her for a coito nel bosco along with a comrade and his capture - a foreign girl speaking remarkably good Italian (har har). She envies the foreign girl - for what she perceives her freedom and her better social standing. Somehow in her small brainbox hosting an even tinier brain this makes sense. She gives the boyfriend a hard time, of course, but that doesn't actually go all the way to not putting out. Besides, it's okay, he leaves her behind, stuck with the motel bill she can't pay.
And on, and on, and on in this manner. She's pretty, and she's young, and she's just smart enough to play a length of plywood. Which she does. At some point a man she meets purposefully holds up a mirror to her ; but she doesn't understand of the strange movement in the glass anymore than a cat understands of a calendar.
The end.
This film readily qualifies Pietrangeli among the masters of his craft, for so much tension generated out of so little pretense is rare enough a sight.
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