BILLY WILDER, AVANTI & HOLIDAY BY OSMOSIS

"Italy is not a country. It's an emotion." - Pamela Piggot (Juliet Mills)

Sometimes I think watching a movie is just like taking a cheap holiday. Of course, it's never quite the same as being in a physical location, but just as a book can so well evoke and conjure the atmosphere of a world that you can almost taste the air described in the pages, so too can certain films do the same in the way they emit atmosphere through the screen.

Billy Wilder's Avanti is one such example of this phenomenon for me. Everytime I watch it I feel like I'm on holiday with the protagonists and somehow that balmy, 1970's continental atmosphere is so perfectly preserved in each frame of the film that you feel as if you have stepped onto the island of Ischia itself and could just as easily be drinking from a fiasco of wine like Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills do in the movie.

Wilder made better films than Avanti, but rarely a warmer one and by that I don't just mean climate, but the emotional sincerity and sweetness of the picture which practically radiates humanity as the gentle story of love, death, infidelity and farce unfolds on Ischia, that paradise island.

Carlo Rustichelli's sun infused score also helps massively in creating a magical ambience throughout with its wistful themes carried on jaunty tarantella sprung rhythms. In fact, although Gone With The Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and The Godfather have more obviously indelible scores, Avanti is one is one of the few movie soundtracks I listen to isolated from the film itself. It's genuinely a masterpiece of Italianate sensibility.

Visconti's The Leopard, Polanski's Chinatown and Coppola's Godfather are also similar to Avanti in creating such blissfully immersive atmospheres, where the reality of everyday life seems to dissolve all around you in the process of watching them.

I remember the first time watching Avanti; a friend of my grandmother's recorded a Billy Wilder season on videotape for me as she had Sky Movies and I didn't. Films I read about in great detail in Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner's scholarly book "Journey Down Sunset Boulevard" but had never seen were suddenly made available thanks to her kindness.

It was to be, in essence, my pre-film school school.

I worked my way through thirty years of Billy Wilder's career in Hollywood from The Major and The Minor (1942) to Avanti (1972) and feel I became as close to an expert on the themes and motifs of his work as any academic in the field.

Wilder's career can be summarised succinctly by essentially understanding that he was a European in Hollywood, the opposite of an American in Paris and his psychology in story telling is split between his old world European sensibility and his assimilation into the brash new American world of the 20th century. Most of his films oscillate between these two sensibilities one way or another.

By the time we get to the autumn of his film directing career, we find Wilder returning to Europe as he mellows and reveals his increasingly wistful and nostalgic traits.

Perhaps no moment better demonstrates the siesta pace of the film than the scene in the morgue where Juliet Mills and Jack Lemmon both pay respects to their late parents whilst a fastidious and bereaucratic funeral director deals with the  order of the death certificates being signed.

The combination of mood, lighting, emotion and pathos is perfectly balanced in typical Wilder fashion as even death is not spared the idiosyncrasies of the Italian lifestyle.

Now this may seem a bit tenuous but in Avanti there is a hotel valet character called Bruno played by Gianfranco Barra. Coincidentally, my late grandmother took me once to a local Italian restaurant called Bruno's in Heavitree, Exeter when I was little and now I think back on it, it was imbued with exactly the same euro kitsch atmosphere of Avanti. I had caused a huge fuss refusing to wear a brand new pair of trousers bought for me that day and it was only out of sheer exhaustion from my own tantrum that I finally succumbed to having supper with my grandmother at Bruno's. I never met the proprietor but now imagine him to look like the aforementioned fictional character. I also distinctly remember its umbrella style awning with the restaurant's name emblazoned across it.

Looking back, I'm glad I eventually calmed down as somehow the memory of the evening now seems indelible and possibly pre-empted my love for pastiche European stereotypes that were so loveable in those politically incorrect days when all cultures could be equally mocked and adored without any real malice. Bruno's restaurant was as much a caricature of Italian culture as Billy Wilder's Avanti and all the better for it. Perhaps the irony ultimately was that the owner was attempting to be sincere while Mr Wilder was poking fun at a culture he felt he had every right to tease. The Mussolini era had given licence for outsiders to do that for decades after his reign. Of course, Anglo-Americans get just as much stereotyping in Wilder's 'Italian' film as anyone else with plenty of digs at Nixonian corruption in the guise of State Department Agent J.J Blodgett played by Edward Andrews.

Incidentally, Bruno's restaurant subsequently changed hands a decade or two later and last time I checked was now called Quo Vadis.

Branded parasols in outdoor cafes and bars, swimming in the Tyrrhenian sea, and coffee and orange juice for breakfast - what could be more perfect than Italy in the 1970's before Europe and the world became as self-conscious as Eve in the garden of Eden due to increasing globalisation and wokeness.

At least now, when I want to duck out of the chaos and division of the 21st Century with all its many multitudinal clusterfucks, I can dive into the serenity of Billy Wilder's Avanti for an hour or two without a care or two.

And this is what I mean when I say watching a movie sometimes can be the cheapest form of vacation as your mind immerses itself in the escapism of cine-atmospheres presented by the great masters such as Visconti, Fellini, Wilder and more recently Sorrentino.

In these complicated pandemic times, I don't know what I would now prefer: booking a flight out of cake island (i.e UK) or scouring my film library for an even quicker getaway.

Maybe I'll make a quick return to Ischia this afternoon and be back home in time for tea after its all over.

One final anecodote before I go and re-watch Avanti for the twentieth time.

It was back in 2013 and my Acer laptop had given up the ghost after I'd returned from the cinema watching American Hustle for my sins. I had little funds at the time to buy a new computer and was feeling acutely bereft.

The following day I made an online sale of a CD I had only one copy of. It was Carlo Rustichelli's original soundtrack for Avanti. I had bought my one single copy, one of a thousand copies distributed worldwide by MGM in an Our Price in Penzance, Cornwall for around a £5 a few years before.

Noticing it was rare, I listed it for sale at a ridiculously high price, not because I believed it would sell but because deep down I really didn't want to lose it.

Spoiler alert. It sold for £500 and suddenly I had the funds needed to buy a replacement laptop.

With new laptop purchased, I felt as if Rustichelli had spared my blushes from a computer free fate.  

But the story doesn't end there.

A week or two after buying my new laptop, the Avanti CD had mysteriously returned from Germany where it had been dispatched to. Confused as to what to do next, I contacted the online retail platform I'd made the sale through and they advised me that if there was no word from the buyer that I should hold onto the CD until they eventually got back to me.

I waited a couple of years but the buyer of the CD never materialised.

Who knows what happened? A phantom purchase? A ghost in the machine. Possibly.

Eventually I re-listed the CD for a similar high price, less keen this time to sell it but knowing anything was possible, including miracles.

I then had an enquiry about the soundtrack by a man who wanted to buy it for a greatly reduced price. He told me that it had special significance for him as it reminded him of his late wife. He needed it for her funeral but we calculated it wouldn't get there in time due to overseas posting so I suggested I would send him a digital copy of the soundtrack so he could have it instantly. I WeTransferred him the music and he thanked me for it, though I was just glad I could talk to someone else who appreciated Rustichelli's score as much as I did.

And still the CD remained with me, until it didn't.

Spoiler alert. It sold again to a new buyer. For the exact same amount as before and so now I'd made a cool grand from a five pound investment.

And this time the CD never came back and although I still feel its absence in my life, I have a copy of the original CD that I uploaded into my music library.

Now, on top of the original love for the score, I have the additional sense of magic that goes with it bringing good fortune in times of hardship.

All this good energy is connected surely?

To quote Armando Trotta in Avanti.

"You bet your sweet batootie!"