A Special Day · reception & legacy

1977 · Ettore Scola

How A Special Day has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Acclaimed on arrival — Cannes 1977, a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe win — it still spent decades as 'the other Loren–Mastroianni film' before a 2014 restoration and a Criterion release turned it into a modern cinephile essential.

What's debated

The perennial fan debate: is this the true peak of the Loren–Mastroianni partnership — two megastars cast radically against type — over their glossier De Sica comedies?

Its footprint

The image of Loren and Mastroianni among the drying bedsheets on the rooftop has become shorthand for the whole film, and it's now a fixture on lists of essential queer cinema and films about ordinary life under fascism.

Where it stands

A canon climber and quiet Letterboxd favourite — the 'small' Italian masterpiece people press on friends who only know Loren from the glamour years.

★ Did you know? Mastroianni, cinema's eternal Latin lover, played a persecuted gay radio announcer and Loren went deglamorized as a worn-down housewife — casting so against type that it earned Mastroianni an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.