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The United States underwent a major social revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s, but it wasn’t strictly an American phenomenon. While the civil rights, women’s and LGBT liberation movements, Vietnam war protests, psychedelic drugs and the sexual revolution were upending Ozzie and Harriet’s America, those same forces were operating in different measures all over the world.
An anti-war movement roiled Australia over its involvement in Vietnam, the U.K. abolished laws against abortion and homosexuality and made the contraceptive pill universally available, and protests in France led to a nationwide employment strike. International literary figures like Iris Murdoch (Irish), Vladimir Nabokov (Russian) and Kingsley Amis (English) were as significant to the literary canon of the period as any American novelists. Harold Pinter (English), Samuel Beckett (Irish) and Tom Stoppard (Czech) were top-tier playwrights in the United States. And the two most popular bands in the world — The Beatles and The Rolling Stones — were from the U.K.
The gap was arguably wider in film. Popular American movies of the early 1960s like Cleopatra and The Music Man were corporately produced and broadly targeted for a suburban audience, and it was not until the 1970s that indies (Taxi Driver), gritty thrillers (The French Connection), horror films (The Exorcist) and skin flicks (Deep Throat) would come to prominence in the United States — by which time European filmmakers had spent a decade or longer defining and finding popular appeal for all of those genres.
Swede Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut get a big chunk of the critical attention for their arty, thought-provoking films, but Italian directors were having a lot more fun. Divorce Italian Style (1961) won an Academy Award for original screenplay for its comedic take on a time when divorce was illegal in Italy. When Sophia Loren won an Academy Award for World War II drama Two Women (1962), she had been baring her ample rack in Italian sex comedies for a decade.
Alberto Lattuada, who worked with Federico Fellini in the 1950s, was prolific and provocative in the 1960s, when he directed 10 films that ranged from a drama about adolescent sexual awakening (Sweet Deceptions) to a Mafia comedy (Mafioso) to a sci-fi spy parody (Matchless). In Come Have Coffee With Us, Lattuada made one of the later works of comedia all’italiana — “comedy, Italian-style” films of the 1960s and early 1970s that commented on Italy’s modernizing economy and changing social mores — about a tax inspector who moves to an Italian village and takes an interest in three unmarried, unsexed spinsters.
Ugo Tognazzi plays the lead as a less-flamboyant version of the drag-club owner he would play a few years later in La Cage aux Folles. As Inspector Paronzini, he swishes wine around his mouth like mouthwash and speaks in Inspector Clouseau-like declarations. (He also looks uncannily like Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther.) He’s a middle-aged throwback figure — a self-assured Don Draper-type who’s been to war and looks good in a suit.
Tognazzi insinuates himself into the lives of the Tettamanzi sisters — the tightly-wound Fortunata (Angela Goodwin), whose hair is also tightly wound; the tall and awkward Tarsilla (Francesca Romana Coluzzi), who has a prosthetic mole above her lip the size of a shirt button; and the fragile Camilla (Milena Vukotic), who’s implied to have spent time in a mental institution and cheeches like a monkey in one of the films’s weirder scenes.
The sisters are also throwback figures. In an Italy that had been modernizing, urbanizing and moving to the northern part of the country in the generation since the end of World War II, they lived in a home on a small estate they had inherited from their father in the southern part of the country. In an Italy where women had been on the pill for a decade and where feminism was rising as it was in the United States, the sisters — played by actresses in their 30s and 40s — were sexually inexperienced and naive of the outside world.
Come Have Coffee With Us, which is making its U.S. streaming premiere right now on MUBI, progresses as a microcosm of the decline of the patriarchy in the 1960s. Tognazzi begins with a dutiful, entitled evaluation of the sisters to determine which is the most appropriate wife for him to take. After marrying one of them, he becomes a predatory and still-entitled womanizer who seduces the other two. By the end, though, the women are in charge.
The film is foremost a slapstick comedy with visual gags like rooster-on-chicken action and a bit character — no pun intended (maybe a little) — with the most exaggerated underbite I’ve ever seen. There’s a scene of Fortunata walking a little side to side — I’ll let Ariana Grande explain that one — after her honeymoon. In the numerous scenes of the foursome walking through the town, the most recently deflowered sister gets the pole position. (Pun 100 percent intended.)
The sexual politics are a little uncomfortable. The father of the three sisters is depicted dying in his taxidermy shop in the first scene and the sisters are heartbroken and in mourning when they meet Tognazzi, so the film’s depiction of him as both a paternal figure and a sexual partner is entirely intentional. The film is coy with whether each sister knows what is happening with the other two, but they’re all in a better emotional place (and more fulfilled) by the end.
Come Have Coffee With Us plays more as a happy accident for the Tettamanzi sisters than as female empowerment. It’s almost the inverse of Nine to Five (1980), a female-empowerment comedy where the three leading women create their own destiny by kidnapping their sexist boss. Baby steps, though. The women’s liberation movement was still a few years before its peak in the early 1970s and had to lose its virginity before it could roar.
Come Have Coffee With Us will be available to MUBI subscribers through February 27.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
