Divorce, Italian Style: Criterion Collection DVD Review
May 21, 2005
The other day I was walking around Blockbuster, looking to pick up “Kinsey” for a re-watch, but the pathetic five copies they had were all out. Steamed as I was, I continued on, only to find new releases like “Racing Stripes” and “Son of the Mask” each had about 100 copies, a whole wall full to themselves, as if the corporate monster chain knew the art crowd wouldn’t be as plentiful for weekend rentals as the childish comedy crowd. This I’ve come to expect from Blockbuster, who every now and then gets in a rare Asian horror film or a new classic release like “My Own Private Idaho”, but the lame comedies that Hollywood spits out at a rapid fire pace always gets a full shelf, and here I am, painfully wishing I could find one of the all time funniest films recently released by The Criterion Collection, “Divorce, Italian Style”, in my neighborhood video store. Thankfully, like any film buff these days, I belong to Netflix, which allows me to get virtually any DVD I want, and thus, I obtained Pietro Germi’s famous classic for my home viewing enjoyment. And what a joy it is; a spirited farce and social satire about the rigidity of Catholic morals and the sanctity of marriage, filled with black humor revolving around everything from adultery and murder to that age old quandary- is it okay to lust after my comely 16-year-old first cousin while my frumpy, party mustachioed wife lies next to me in bed, in perpetual heat? The classic Italian farce is from 1961, a time in Italian cinema when Fellini was constantly pushing the boundaries of realism within sexual fantasy, which is often starkly surreal, and it stars the greatest of all Italian leading men, Marcello Mastroianni, in perhaps his best comedic performance, as a man desperate to shed himself of his excess marital baggage, in favor of his young cousin, though morals, and Catholic rules strictly forbid divorce. Unless, and here’s the kicker, you catch your spouse in an unfaithful act, prompting murderous revenge, which would result in some downtime in prison, but what’s three years in light of personal freedom to have at a forbidden nymphet.
The plot is classic sensation, mixed with Italian farce, sexual frustration, and religious satire, and it all comes off like a mad dash from the alter to the grave, via the 9:43 train to you know where, way down there. Mastroianni is Don Ferdinando Cefalu, a suave, quiet gentleman from an aristocratic family whose patriarch is a pathetic drunken gambler, daughter is a bookish secretary in love with a gravedigger, and eldest son wants only one thing, his wife dead, and his cousin Angela in his bed. Ferdinando narrates a series of fantasies about the potential death of his wife- in one she drowns in a vat of boiling soap (the Witch image is wholly implied), in another she drowns in beach quicksand, and in yet another, she is lost to space on a one-man rocket ship. Of course, none of these scenarios can come true, so Ferdinando concocts a revenge/murder plot, hiring his wife’s old crush to paint their living room, thus hoping to catch the two in the act with his newly bought tape recorder. The scene where Ferdinando races from the living room to his bedroom to hear the tape, and then back to the living room, to catch the painter alone with, gasp, the housemaid, is a thing of comedic beauty and pitch perfect timing.
“Divorce, Italian Style” is one of the most famous Italians films of the ‘60’s, and Criterion’s 2-disk Special Edition is ripe with interviews and featurettes remembering the film, and its little known director, Pietro Germi. The new print is amazing, highlighting Germi’s gorgeous and sometimes tricky black and white compositions, while the soundtrack, often muddled on old VHS editions, is now crisp and clear, making Mastroianni’s priceless narration all the more important to the film’s anarchic silliness. The bitterly funny screenplay won an Oscar in ’63, rare for a foreign film, and in a remarkable year for leading men, Mastroianni, up against Jack Lemmon (“Days of Wine and Roses”), Burt Lancaster (“The Birdman of Alcatraz”), and Peter O’Toole (“Lawrence of Arabia”), lost Best Actor to Gregory Peck, who received the sentimental popular vote for “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The nomination was apt- Mastroianni, the same year he starred in Antonioni’s depressing “La Notte”, and three years after his other great comedic gem, “Big Deal on Madonna Street”, is the very picture of a lovesick, scheming, potential cuckold, with his shifty eyes, slicked hair, mousy twitch, and breakneck narrative style.
One of the film’s best jokes is an in-joke; when the scandalous “La Dolce Vita” comes to his small Sicilian town, Ferdinando bolts the theater, just as Anita Ekberg (“She’s quite the specimen,” says the sister’s gravedigger, “but I know she has no soul.”) does her famous dance in the great fountain. The joke being that obviously Ferdinando couldn’t possibly watch more of the film, because the next scene in Fellini’s classic sees Mastroianni join Ekberg in the fountain, and even though “Divorce, Italian Style” is a screwball comedy, breaking the cinematic fourth wall with such a radically self-reflexive attitude would be too much. Don Ferdinando leaves the theater to catch his wife with the painter, as the town men gawk at Ekberg, and the town women secretly hate their men for it, and with this the codes of marriage in Germi’s hilarious masterpiece are plain as day. That fantasy, no matter how glorious, is of an impossible reach, and reaching too hard (the spoils of which can be seen in the film’s dead-on ironic final shot), could get you into deep, deep trouble- secularly, morally, personally, or otherwise scientifically related to all things sacred in the holy bond of marriage.
“Divorce, Italian Style” has been released on DVD by The Criterion Collection and can be bought for 28 dollars or less on most DVD websites. Or you could rent “Racing Stripes”, but I wouldn’t recommend it, despite Blockbuster’s insistence.
by Adam Suraf