"The Working Class Goes to Heaven" was filmed by the famous Italian director Petri in the 1970s when Italian "political films" were in the ascendant. The film covers a wide range of content, from the realities of workers' work and life to the direction of the union struggle, from the radical student movement to the ideological confusion of workers and so on. It can be said that the film clearly reflects the characteristics of the times at that time.
Lu Lu is an ordinary worker. He worked tirelessly because at the end of the month he felt content when he got his bulging pay sack. With this money, he has to pay for his son's living expenses and satisfy his vain, dress-loving girlfriend Lydia. But he had no opinion, and when he heard the slogans of "all power belongs to the proletariat" and "overthrow the capitalists" from the college students, he was shaken again. When his girlfriend left him, he felt depressed and overwhelmed. He was afraid of seeing his wife's contemptuous eyes, and also afraid that his son would reject him. He finds his factory girlfriend, Militina, and has sex with her in the car, but he still can't get rid of his worries. He did not listen to the opinions of the co-workers, and was eventually swayed by the radical student trend. In fact, the film convincingly reflects the ideological reality of the generation in that era through the reproduction of the daily life of the character Lu Lu: on the one hand, they were influenced by the myth of the revolution; on the other hand, they could not resist the assets The lure of class welfarism. In addition, the conflict between the labor union and the student movement reflected in the film, as well as the rebuke of the labor union's high-efficiency production slogan, aroused widespread debate at the time.
After the film was released in Italy and Europe and the United States, critics were generally positive about it. The main reason is that it is different from films showing workers in general, and there is no tendency to conceptualize. French film critic Gaston Horst believes that the film has three distinct features or advantages: first, it more realistically represents the life and labor environment of workers (such as assembly line production in the film, collective discussion of strike issues, labor accidents) , the conflict scenes with the pickets, etc.); secondly, the film more accurately shows the temperament of the workers (such as revolutionary courage and clumsiness, union workers' contempt for ordinary workers, etc.); thirdly, the film more accurately shows Based on the psychological state of the protagonist, the author subtly expresses his actual psychological activities and the dramatic factors that complement these psychological activities. The author expresses the complex psychological problems and complex living environment of workers in a fluent manner, and neither trade union workers, extreme "leftists" nor bosses are caricatured or made into a face.
"Working Class to Heaven" (the title itself has great irony) is another example of the director's continued use of film to analyze the psychological state of contemporary people after the filming of "Investigation of an Unsuspecting Citizen" in 1970. a try. In the last film, he explored the distorted psychological state of the upper-level political realm, where those in power do all kinds of evil and shield each other. In this film, he explores the psychological state of another class, the working class. The protagonist of both films is played by the outstanding Italian actor Ginger Maria Frontai. If it is said that in the last film, in order to highlight the political color, the image of the police officer he played was more or less exaggerated and masked, then, in this film, he played the image of Lu Lu as a worker. It must be real and believable, with flesh and blood. Such as the joy on his face when he got the salary bag, the helplessness on his face when he was short of money after the strike, and the anxiety and nervousness after losing his job, etc., he performed vividly, which made many people learn more or less from him. I saw less of my own shadow.
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