When you’ve made arguably one of the greatest films of all time, a director is normally allowed to do anything he or she decides is worth their time, granted its within reasonable limits, and maintains some kind of artistic integrity. Vittorio De Sica is the mind behind Bicycle Thieves, a film that not only stands as perhaps the finest work to ever come from Italy but as one that established a new kind of cinematic storytelling, a form of portraying reality through reducing life to nothing but the bare essentials. This was something de Sica was well-versed in throughout his career, using it extremely effectively in the majority of his films, even those that deviated from the neo-realist style he is normally associated with. A genre that not many people look at when considering his more straightforward dramas is the comedies he made throughout his career, one of which we’re discussing now. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Italian: leri, oggi, domani) is a delightful anthology film that sees the director exploring some of his more frequent topics, namely social inequality and love, which are woven together in this deliriously brilliant set of vignettes that find De Sica doing some of his most compelling work, collaborating with two of Italy’s most important stars (who are in turn giving terrific performances that stand as some of their own personal best work) and putting together one of the most honest portrayals of life and its innumerable social idiosyncracies into a film that was remarkably ahead of its time, and still remains one of the most insightful comedies to be made on the subject of love, and the occasional absence of it in a world driven crazy but the search for carnal satiation.

Romance is a delicate topic, but is perhaps the subject that has been most explored artistically – how else do we justify the creation of art in the first place if not as a way of focusing on the affairs of the heart and mind? Much like the majority of his work, De Sica is intent on starting with a bold premise, and gradually eroding the veneer of socially-mediated mythology until all that’s left is a fully-authentic portrayal of that particular issue. This is no different for his works that tended towards romance, as was a common theme with a variety of his works, particularly those that can slightly later in his career when Italian cinema had once again started to embrace a more joyful disposition after the dust had settled from the Second World War. All this exposition goes into explaining exactly why Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is one of the most insightful works of De Sica’s career, and one that may not constantly cited as one of his masterpieces, but certainly warrants such praise, particularly when contrasting this with other portrayals of romance, very few of which manage to blend outrageous comedy and heartfelt, human drama quite as much as this film. There’s so much merit to be found in this film, which manages to be quite insightful towards the main tenets of traditional love stories while adding in some daring commentary that touches quite heavily on the idea of sexuality and desire, which are themes that are far from rare in these kinds of films, but in retrospect indicate precisely why Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is something of a minor masterpiece in the canon of great portrayals of love – in all aspects – ever committed to film. De Sica was a genius, and this film is only further proof of that.

In the most simple terms, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is a film centred around the interactions between men and women. The film is presented as an anthology, telling the stories of various couples and their experiences with love. They all occupy different regions of the country, but more importantly are embodiments of different levels of the socio-economic ladder that governed the country at this time. The first story focuses on Adelina, a young working-class woman in Naples who is about to be arrested for not paying for furniture she bought on credit, and she discovers that she can avoid prison by getting pregnant, as they can’t legally arrest her while she’s bearing a child. She and her husband keep up this plan for years until they finally wear themselves out and Adelina has to just accept her sentence. The second story is centred on Anna, a wealthy socialite whose husband has temporarily left their Milanese home, causing her to seek out one of the gentlemen she uses for extramarital philandering, and set out on a romantic vacation to the countryside, only to encounter a variety of challenges, the consequences of which she forces onto her poor partner, whose inability to stand up for himself ends with him literally being left on the side of the road. The final story is focused on Mara, a beautiful woman in Rome who works as a high-class escort, and single-handedly defies the socially-mediated conventions of people in her profession, possessing a heart of gold and pleasant disposition that leads her to befriend her neighbour, a young man training to become a priest, only to have his grandmother step in and demand the scabrous woman leave her innocent grandson alone, all the while Mara has to fend off the advances of a randy businessman who is frequently in search of not necessarily her services, but rather her heart as a whole.

The various stories share themes but ultimately serve to offer three different glimpses into the trials and tribulations of different factions of Italian society at the time in which De Sica was working. In this regard, we wrangles two of the country’s most important performers to play the lead roles in all three stories. Marcello Mastroianni, inarguably one of the greatest screen stars to ever work in the medium, gives one of his funniest performances here, and whether taking on the role of the dedicated husband who grows tired of his wife’s constant need to be pregnant, going so far as to living in a factory as it is less of a nuisance, to the businessman driven to insanity by his desires, Mastroianni is exceptionally funny, finding the nuance in a set of outrageous characters that give him the chance to once again play off his natural charms, while still demonstrating an insightful understanding of character. However, he’s consistently pushed to the background by Sophia Loren, who collaborated with De Sica on numerous films, and once again brings her incredible talents to this film. Playing three different characters, Loren is astonishing (although anyone who has witnessed her extraordinary work during the 1960s will undoubtedly confirm that her work here was very much par for the course), and the film eventually coalesces around her, placing her in the centre of every one of these stories – and whether playing the despicable Anna, or the absolutely charming Mara, Loren does some of her finest work, navigating the narrow boundary between good-natured humour and farce in a way not many performers could have managed to do so successfully. She’s an actress who never hid the fact that she was supremely gifted as a performer, and while everyone may have a different example of why she’s one of the screen’s finest talents, it was Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that consolidated how she is truly a timeless icon of cinema in general.

The brilliance of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow comes in how this is essentially De Sica creating a work that is simultaneously satirical and affectionate, which isn’t something we find very often with comedy films, many of them choosing one or the other. In this film, the director seems to be critiquing popular stereotypes of Italian society while not necessarily reviling them or making a mockery out of them in any insidious way. He’s commenting on many of the different archetypes persistent in the media – the conservative older generation that fear everything that isn’t attuned to their traditional standards, the hedonistic upper-class that would faster hit a child with a car than damage their expensive Rolls Royce, and the jovial working-class, who enjoying defying authority, evading all sense of accountability for the sake of asserting their dominance en masse. Siphoning some quite serious themes, many of which were profoundly ahead of their time for this period, through a variety of characters gives De Sica the chance to fully explore some fascinating concepts. This is where the anthology structure works well, since none of these stories are strong enough to stand on their own or become full-length films, but rather serve a much more essential purpose when juxtaposed against each other. We’re shown fragments of life, and when funnelled through the lens of outrageous comedy, the underlying message, as slight as it may appear on the surface, begins to permeate into the film, creating quite a memorable experience that proves De Sica was a director always firmly in control of his craft.

Ultimately, we can conclude that throughout his career, De Sica established himself essentially as something of a social commentator, someone who was perpetually in observance of the many different idiosyncrasies of his nation, meticulously portraying them in his work, and creating timeless snapshots of his country at a particular point in time. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow occupies a strange place in his career – by no means an obscure film, having received rapturous acclaim and adoration over the years, but still rarely placed in the upper-echelons of his films when discussing him broadly. However, the experience of seeing this film confirms it as one of the prolific director’s absolute masterpieces, an elegant and outrageously funny anthology film about love, which explores the intersections between romance and sexuality in a bawdy, but not necessarily vulgar manner, which remains refreshingly honest even by modern standards, particularly when we consider how films made during this time treated the more risque subjects as entirely taboo. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is certainly not a film that exploits the subject matter in an inappropriate way, often even playing it too safe at some moments with a tone of overt sentimentality that is there to counteract the more edgy subject matter – however, it all balances out in the end. This is just a charming comedy that is massively sincere with an overt sense of authenticity that can only come from someone like Vittorio De Sica, who remains one of the most insightful filmmakers to ever work in the medium, and delivers what is undoubtedly one of the finest portrayals of love ever put on film, a truly unforgettable and utterly delightful affair in every conceivable way.