MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Lady!’ Feasts on Dark Comedy

Ermanno Olmi’s “Long Live the Lady!” (opening Friday at the Monica 4-Plex) is a triumph of comic observation. Although not actually a silent film, it plays like one, for what’s important here is not what people are saying but what they are doing and what that reveals about them. It has a deceptively lighthearted tone for the masterful director of the elegiac “Tree of Wooden Clogs,” and its considerable substance is expressed in exceedingly subtle ways.

Entirely devoid of exposition, “Long Live the Lady!” takes us into a vast, mountaintop castle that has been turned into a luxury hotel in a handsome, tasteful blend of the ancient and the sleekly modern. The quality of its service is such that it operates its own school for servants on the premises, complete with slide-show presentations of great banquets of centuries past. Among the people taking this rigorous course are four young men and two young women, top achievers who are to be rewarded for their efforts by the opportunity to help serve at a banquet of apparently the utmost importance.

At first, the film is as seductive as it is funny. It lulls you into considering how wonderful it would be to get such perfect service at a meal, where no detail is overlooked and where everything is served with grace, dispatch and courtesy. Ah, the good old days, when people took pride in their work, no matter how menial, tedious or exacting. Yet, as the film’s sense of ritual deepens, we gradually realize that a loss of proportion is setting in: Should one group of people really be going to such extreme lengths to serve another? We begin to realize that concern for form and etiquette is so total at this hotel that it rivals that at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.

Olmi, who began in documentaries, brings a documentary-like quality to his depiction of the training and the intricate preparations for the great banquet, which will be presided over by the Signora (Marisa Abbate), a woman of the approximate antiquity of the High Lama of Shangri-La in “Lost Horizon.”

As her guests assemble around an enormous U-shaped table, the meal commences. Even though the food looks as delicious as that of “Babette’s Feast,” it’s a joyless business affair that at one point even involves the wheeling out of TV monitors so that the guests can see what looks to be a healthy profit profile, presumably of some corporation also owned by the old woman.

As the meal progresses we’re gradually made to realize that it’s the huge staff of waiters choreographed into a veritable ballet of flawless serving who are the real aristocrats, while the guests are the true peasants. In their boredom they’ll play with their food, snitch the silverware, flirt with the help, and in one instance have the bad manners to die. All the while their darkly veiled hostess constantly surveys her vulgar guests through a pair of opera glasses. Occasionally, she will whisper to an aide almost as old as she, but otherwise she has nothing to do with her guests except to make a slight, regal acknowledgement of their fervent toast, “Lunga Vita alla Signora!” (or “Long Live the Lady!”).

Among the six apprentices Olmi begins concentrating on Libenzio (Marco Esposito), a bright teen-ager of perhaps 16 whose face has not yet grown big enough for his outsize ears and glasses. More and more Libenzio moves to the fore, and as he does, the film takes on new and richer meanings. The banquet emerges as a metaphor for society and even for life itself with all its absurdities, injustices and distorted values. In this film (Times-rated Mature), a miracle of economy and parch-dry dark humor, Olmi suggests there’s no real escape for any of us.

‘LONG LIVE THE LADY!’

(‘LUNGA VITA ALLA SIGNORA!)

An International Film Exchange release of a Heritage Entertainment presentation of a co-production of RAI Channel 1/Cinemaundici with the collaboration of Istituto Luce. RAI producer Giuseppe Cereda. Line producer Marcell Siena. Writer-director Ermanno Olmi. Camera Maurizio Zaccaro. Costumes Francesca Sartori. With Marco Esposito, Marisa Abbate, Alberto Francescato, Simona Brandalise, Stefania Busarello, Simone Dalla Rosa, Lorenzo Paolini, Tarcisio Tosi. In Italian, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.