Sunday, November 18, 2007

Divorce, Italian Style

Ah, those wacky Italians and their strange customs.

An aristocrat in a small Sicilian town has tired of his wife and fallen in love with his jailbait cousin. Given the impossibility of divorce under Roman Catholicism, he decides he should catch his wife in an affair and murder her on the spot in order to escape his marital woes and win the girl of his dreams. A dry and rather cynical comedy of errors inevitably ensues.

Marcello Mastroianni is of course fantastic, gradually developing a nervous tic as his plans come closer and closer to failure. The film abounds in details that are understated yet poignant: the pencilled-in unibrow and moustache of the wife that only appear during moments of intimacy, the conveyance of respect or scorn by the townspeople through their background actions, even the husband's occasional fantasies of his wife's untimely demise. And who can forget the maid-groping grandfather?

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Divorzio all'italiana (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [_____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [_____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

No comments: