La classe operaia va in paradiso: The asylum
The mental hospital where Lulù Massa (Volontè) meets "Militina" (Randone), a former worker who went mad in the factory, is the "Maggiore della Carità" hospital, located in Corso Giuseppe Mazzini 18 in Novara.
Watch the movie on www.movieitalyplus.com
PLOT:
Ludovico Massa, known as Lulu, a worker in a metal factory, is something of a piecework champion: none of his comrades can match his productive pace. Well liked by the boss, who adjusts his performance to that of the other workers, he is not too well liked by his fellow workers. On the other hand, Lulu is not happy with himself either: he produces, he consumes as he has the car, the TV set, the house full of useless objects, but he kills himself with fatigue, so much so that he no longer even has the strength to have relations with the woman he lives with. However, despite his discouraging visits to a former companion who has ended up from the factory in the asylum, Lulu continues to keep up his grueling work schedule until one day he loses a finger. Completely changed, he speaks out against the piecework mechanism, advocating--in agreement with a group of extra-parliamentary extremists and opposed to the unions--the need for an all-out strike. Scuffles break out with the police and Lulu is fired on the spot. Abandoned by his partner, who only cared about having a fur coat, and by the extremists themselves, who judge his as a personal case and therefore unrelated to the struggle, Lulu, thanks to the intervention of the unions, is rehired. But by now he, too, is on the threshold of insanity, and to his comrades, engaged as always in a frantic struggle with the processing times, he fantasizes about a wall to be knocked down beyond which lies the paradise of the working class.