“Avanti!”, by Billy Wilder: our review

Wendell Armbruster Jr., the son of an influential businessman, learns of his father’s accidental death while he, true to form, was staying at a seaside resort in Italy. The state of grace of a biting director: a most delightful breath of fantasy.

Lhe pre-credits, silent sequence with Jack Lemmon taking a plane is hilarious. After the death of his father, he left for Italy. There he discovers that the father had a mistress, whose daughter he meets…

Unlike many films by the great Billy (One two three, For example), Avanti ! is a serene film, which takes its time (more than two hours), while everyone is very agitated. Irony and sarcasm, masterfully dosed, fade in favor of a romanticism already revealed by The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. It is a hymn to love, to idleness, to the sweetness of life, which is constantly threatened by the dangerous, the absurd, the evil – the grotesque apparition of an American general, half ganache, half moron. But, as in Sabrina, harmony prevails over disorder and hysteria.