Divorce Italian Style

I went to see the 1961 Italian comedy DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE at the Hollywood Theatre this evening. It was presented by the guy who used to write movie reviews for the Oregonian, Shawn Levy. His most recent book, DOLCE VITA CONFIDENTIAL, covers 1950s Rome, including Italian cinema, and he's clearly an expert on the subject. He got on my bad side when I was 17 and he gave SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 5 out of 4 stars in the Oregonian because, after all, that's impossible. But now I'm an old man and I don't care anymore. It's amazing what you'll forgive in your twilight years.

DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE was directed by Pietro Germi, who is not a huge name in Italian neo-realism, and stars Marcello Mastroianni, who is. Apparently Mastroianni was a dramatic star on stage, then relegated to goofy roles on screen, and with his lead turn in LA DOLCE VITA became an unexpected Latin Lover. Uncomfortable with that role, he sought to undo it with flicks like this one.

Mastroianni stars as a Sicilian from a noble family on the decline. They're running out of money fast and Mastroianni's down to living in half of a run-down palace, with his extended family living in the other half. He's sick of his clingy wife (Daniela Rocca) and yearns for his teenaged cousin (Stefania Sandrelli) who is visiting for the summer.

Inspired by a recent case in the tabloids, Mastroianni hits on the idea of tricking his wife into cheating on him so he can catch her in the act and kill her in the heat of the moment. He figures he'll get a light sentence, due to her act of dishonoring him and his family, and then he'll be able to be with his cousin. After all, at this time and place, divorce would be impossible.

Mastroianni is all pencil mustache, cigarette holder and slicked back hair, except of course in his more manic moments, when his slicked back hair puffs up into unruly, sweaty curls. He's delightfully slimy but thanks to the miracles of cinema we're always on his side, watching in anticipation as he sets up his wife and one obstacle after another gets in the way of his attempts to trap her. Rocca, as the wife, could have had a thankless role, with an exaggerated unibrow and faint mustache meant to make her less attractive and provide excuses for Mastroianni's philandering, but the comedy allows her to rise above it as she takes the character to at first annoying and oblivious and then to cunning new heights as she turns the tables on her husband.

Even though I'm supposed to be a film buff I've never been able to sit through the entirety of either LA DOLCE VITA or 8 1/2, but a melodramatic comedy like this one is easy to love, especially with Mastroianni's alternatively twitchy and smooth performance as the transparent wannabe jilted lover. In this flick, when overblown moonlight trysts occur, they're played for laughs, and that somehow makes the heightened romance both more realistic and more fun to watch. I'm not sure what the trick is -- maybe if you're laughing, you can swallow over-the-top stuff a little more easily? Whatever it is, the fact that you're supposed to be laughing at these soap opera characters makes them easier to relate to than... well, soap opera characters.

This flick amazingly won best screenplay at the Oscars even though it's in Italian, and it's easy to see why. Something as simple as the breathless narration by Mastroianni is rendered unique by the way he starts and stops it depending on what's going on on-screen -- in one moment, he's narrating and his wife looks at home so he pauses a moment before going on more discreetly.

I saw Mastroianni once before in YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, another Italian romantic comedy, this one with Sofia Loren, in which the two stars played three sets of couples in three short stories. Levy observed a shortened version of this flick would have fit right in with those stories, and he's right.