64/100
"We were poor and happy, as the rich say." Dunno whether I've ever fallen hard for one of these sprawling, anecdotal portraits of relationships that ebb and flow across multiple decades—this one isolates Vittorio Gassman's character so thoroughly that he doesn't even bump into the other two for some 25 years, with Scola just checking in on Gianni's climb up the corporate ladder every so often. Certainly it's not difficult for me to compile a list of favorite scenes—Nicola whiffing the game show (exactly as I might, by interpreting the question too literally; think that genuinely did fuck me up slightly on the SAT's reading comprehension section, so that my math score improbably was higher than my verbal); Gianna not correcting Antonio when he assumes that Gianni's working as a parking-lot attendant; Scola re-creating La dolce vita's Trevi Fountain shoot, complete with actual Fellini and Mastroianni (but only an Ekberg stand-in)—but I can't say that it all culminates in anything that much rattled me. Same's true of Scola's formal playfulness, which has everyone constantly breaking the fourth wall and being captured by theatrical spotlights as the surrounding cast freezes (at one point this device explicitly becomes an homage to O'Neill's Strange Interlude); my favorite bit was Antonio and Luciana going to see Of Human Bondage and imagining their own voices dubbing Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey with dialogue about themselves, which is clever and fun and doesn't tie into anything thematically as far as I can tell. Stefania Sandrelli fares remarkably well playing a woman who mostly just bounces around among the three dudes without quite developing a personality beyond "desirable" (Giovanna Ralli, as Gianni's deeply unhappy wife, actually gets more to work with) and her co-stars embody a wide spectrum of haplessness with great skill. Good stuff, too diffuse for greatness.
Fun fact: We All Loved Each Other So Much premiered in 1974 but didn't get a U.S. release for three years, when it opened the same day (or at least the same week) as Star Wars. So did the very belated American premiere of Ozu's Equinox Flower.
Now that's a good time at the movies.