Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) DVD

Director Vittorio de Sica’s 1965 classic brings us three short films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

In the first, Sophia as Adelina is unable to pay a 28,000 lire fine for selling cigarettes on the street,
and so becomes pregnant (aided by her flagging husband) year after year to avoid prison. A decade after The Bicycle Thieves, de Sica’s humanist touch is brought to comedy, and his evocative use of the Mediterranean light gifts Sophia Loren’s earth-mother role with the lucency of fruit in the sun. The unseen direction of the myriad extras – market vendors, crowds, families and young children – is a superb, joyous celebration of Italian community life. It’s as if one is remembering the of the back streets of Naples without ever having been there.

The second film – a true vignette – is a tête-à-tête and overture to infidelity set in a Rolls Royce convertible on the autostrada. “The fact is you have money in you,” says Mastroianni’s character. “In me,” replies Loren, “there’s only emptiness… A big emptiness.”

The last film sees a courtesan who saves a young seminarist from backsliding, and in doing so she is obliged to deny her john favours at the last minute because of a promise to her saint. It is shot on a garret terrace above Rome’s Piazza de Navonna, and confirms Sophia Loren’s legend as the supreme Italian woman.

Joe Taffe