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Bebo’s Girl (Luigi Comencini, 1963)

Basic American that I am, I quickly abandoned the meticulously crafted schedule I had created for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in favor of screenings held in air-conditioned venues. The heat made me sleepy and irritable, so you can imagine my reaction when, early on in the festival, I walked into the unventilated Europa Cinema—equipped with vinyl seats, no less—for a migraine-inducingly steamy (in the pejorative sense) showing of The Story of Joanna (1975), by Gerard Damiano of Deep Throat (1972) fame. At the end of this gothic skin flick, which brings together sexual rituals à la Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and a patrician dom who makes Christian Grey look vanilla, the heroine, Joanna (Terri Hall), abandons her personal autonomy in willing submission to her master’s desires. Frankly, the heat had a similarly gutting effect on me: what is individual taste, pleasure, critical scrutiny, when your brain is melting and all you can think about is your next Aperol spritz?

In truth, improvising at Bologna’s premier festival of classic cinema and restorations is no biggie. Yes, I sheepishly canceled the remainder of my screenings at the Europa, but I knew I could easily replace them with equally intriguing films across the festival’s massive lineup of prewar Mikio Naruse talkies, a Katherine Hepburn showcase, noir rarities from mid-century Scandinavia, and plenty of other selections. The cool halls of the Modernissimo—a subterranean Arte Nuova–style theater that first opened in 1915—lured me underground and into an unplanned dalliance with the works of Luigi Comencini. Unlike Dino Risi or Mario Monicelli, his contemporaries in the popular yet socially engaged commedia all’italiana genre, Comencini never quite managed to break through to international audiences; perhaps his humanist streak, reflected in the many films he made about children, gave him a less provocative sheen than his more cynical colleagues.

The best title in the series, Bebo’s Girl (1963), centers on a capricious small-town girl played by a kittenish Claudia Cardinale, who anchors the film’s gradual evolution from naïve romance to historical tragedy. Some time after the end of World War II, Cardinale’s Mara falls for a handsome partisan (George Chakiris) still active in the struggle for postwar justice. Despite his role in the country’s liberation from fascism, his group’s violent acts come back to haunt him, opening up questions about the fractured legacy of the Italian resistance. A polished exemplar of the country’s neorealist tradition, Bebo’s Girl would seem to have little in common with Comencini’s Unknown Woman (1969), a relatively tame giallo about a slick bachelor and claims investigator who falls for the estranged daughter of the suspected victim of a life-insurance scam. If the film’s twists and turns—a sloppy back-and-forth of who is betraying whom—aren’t particularly sophisticated, its heavy air of despondency and fatalism (amplified by a jazzy Ennio Morricone score) are undeniably poignant.

Ultimately, the time I spent with Comencini left me wondering if an auteurist framing made sense for a director whose virtues within European postwar cinema might’ve been clarified by greater historical context—how his films stand apart from those of his countrymen, or how the many genres he tackled (and the ways in which he tackled them) tell a story about the evolution of Italian film production and its transition from the studio system to state sponsorship. Big single-director series tend to throw us into the filmographic deep end, inviting us to look at the evidence and decide for ourselves whether the artist in question was indeed overlooked or underrated. This strikes me as a rather simplistic measure of worth. The program dedicated to the versatile classic Hollywood filmmaker Lewis Milestone, for instance, had one of the best entries in the festival, the Al Jolson–starring musical comedy Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933); and one of the worst, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934), which plays like Grand Hotel (1932) on a shitty cruise ship where half the characters seem drunk, if not asleep. With films like Rain (1932) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), I came away dazzled less by Milestone’s gifts than by the exceptional performances of, respectively, Joan Crawford (as a lip-smacking party girl clashing with a religious bigot) and Barbara Stanwyck (as an ice queen with a terrible secret).

The pearly-white young heroines of the silent-film era were often manipulated into submission by Svengali figures, a cautionary dynamic sidestepped by the Czech classic Erotikon—newly restored and incorporating several of the scenes cut for screenings subsequent to the uncensored premiere held in Prague in February 1929. Director Gustav Machatý captures the seduction of the naïf Andrea (Ita Rina) by a traveling dandy (Olaf Fjord) with unexpected ambivalence, emphasizing, through intimate observations of Rina’s shifting expressions, both the pleasure and discomfort of her carnal initiation. Though the man—an obvious fuckboy, but no vampire, either—unknowingly impregnates Rina, she’s back on her feet a few years later and in a comfortable marriage with a less alluring partner. The onetime lovers reunite and genuinely fall in love, upending the genre’s usual moral calculus, in which women are punished for their premarital trysts, and their tempters are presented as unsympathetic villains. Likewise, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s rapturous 1934 Alpine drama The Kidnapping—one of the first sound films produced in Switzerland—offers a gratifying twist on the gendered archetypes of early cinema. An abducted woman (Dita Parlo), seemingly a damsel in distress, eventually transforms into a pyromaniacal femme fatale, while her kidnapper (Geymond Vital), a deluded shepherd, embarks on a John Wick–style quest for vengeance after her beau kills his terrier.

My twisted fascination with the infamously regressive genre of the French popular comedy meant I couldn’t resist a screening of Coline Serreau’s Three Men and a Cradle (1985), which took place en plein air in the city center’s Piazza Maggiore. After some obligatory misogynistic scene-setting, the film quickly subverted my expectations as the titular three goons gradually embrace their nurturing instincts and joyously enact an alternative to the conventions of heterosexual child-rearing. I don’t remember the American remake, Three Men and a Baby (1987), being quite so sensitive or subtly naturalistic in its portrait of masculine detoxification. Impressed by Mme Serreau, the rare Frenchwoman writer-director to sustain a commercial career across four decades, I resolved to seek out the other films in her showcase. Chaos (2001), a snappy screwball caper with an intersectional feminist heart, has stayed with me for the ways it bypasses the self-congratulatory trappings of an “issue” movie while still hinging its narrative on the kinds of sexism shared by middle-class white women and their working-class immigrant counterparts. The film begins as a satire about white guilt after a bourgeois husband and wife (Vincent Lindon and Catherine Frot) witness an Algerian sex worker being attacked by thugs. As we plumb deeper into their dysfunctional marriage, the sex worker, Malika (Rachida Brakni), with whom Frot’s character strikes up a friendship, takes center stage, emerging from the ashes of apparent victimhood to become an avenging angel with the smarts, sex appeal, and sense of humor of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994)—but, crucially, more heart.

Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani), the schoolgirl protagonist of Sumitra Peries’s The Girls (1978), also lingered in my mind, perhaps because the Sri Lankan classic—made by one of the country’s first female directors—frames her forlorn features so elegantly within its rich tableaux of tropical villages and concrete classrooms. Kusum, a virtuous ingenue, is nothing like her flirtatious older sister, and yet Peries sees them equally as casualties of a highly stratified society, with the film’s undulating rhythms folding their small transgressions and fleeting pleasures into a politically charged story about impossible love. Nouri Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986), another visual stunner, follows a group of Tunisian boys faced with impossible ultimatums of their own: Hachemi (Imed Maalal) is promised to be married, but the sexual abuse he experienced while apprenticing under a carpenter has warped his relationship to sex and masculinity in a society that demands borderline-performative levels of virility. Given these traumatic undercurrents, Man of Ashes is certainly not an empowering or celebratory vision of queer boyhood, but it’s also not peddling the idea that homoerotic desire menaces happy, healthy heterosexual traditions. The ornate, claustrophobic interiors of Hachemi’s family home, for instance, make domesticity seem like a trap. Among him and his dude friends—specifically the unhinged Farfat (Khaled Ksouri), who spearheads one of the film’s most alarmingly aggressive scenes, involving a cat turned into a slingshot—there’s at least a jagged, weird camaraderie in their shared failure to launch.

With their psychologically driven, social-realist narratives and observational aesthetics, both The Girls and Man of Ashes have a certain pedigree; they’re both Cannes-vetted titles (the former screened in the Cannes Classics sidebar this year and the latter premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 1986). I can’t help but notice this stylistic pattern in the kinds of films from the Global South often tapped for restoration by bodies like the Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna. (I mention this not to detract from their crucial work but to signal toward the multiple paths in popular and genre film still ripe for reevaluation.) On my final night in Bologna, I strapped in for the three-hour-plus director’s cut of Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975), a Bollywood megahit that ran for five uninterrupted years in theaters in Mumbai following its initial release. This spaghetti-western musical epic—or “masala western,” as the homegrown hybrid is often described—felt gleefully at odds with the more sober fare I had been taking in over the past week, with mustache-twirling baddies, bromantic harmonica serenades, smoldering dynamite fuses, and extravagantly bloody shootouts Quentin Tarantino wishes he could rival. Sholay sent me off with a reminder that, in the heat of the moment, traditional distinctions between high and low art can simply evaporate like steam off the sidewalk.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and historian who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, and other publications.