Marco Materazzi is impeachable! Whoever heard of getting head-butted in the World Cup final? Almost two months later, it still aches. All this talk of his baiting the Frenchman – calling him a terrorist and invoking matriarchal street vending. Who would talk of such things? Only other Italians, perhaps, with typewriters, Mediterranean lighting, and a singular sense of the tragic and absurd. Three new Criterion titles demonstrate how far fascism’s castor-oil cocktail will travel down the throat of its native filmmakers before it comes back up twice as Azzurri.
Seduced and Abandoned
($29.95) Once Pietro Germi turned to commedia all’Italiana, society’s self-repression gnawed at the director far more than Mussolini. Whereas his Oscar-winning
Divorce Italian Style (
review) uncovered a conspicuous loophole in Catholicism’s ’til death do us part, 1964 follow-up
Sedotta e Abbandonata went after “reparatory marriage” with literal abandon.
Divorce‘s Stefania Sandrelli emotes Germi’s cinematic grounding (“He said to be like in a Chaplin film, a silent film”), but it’s Saro Urzì as her father, Don Vincenzo, who leaves hearts irreparably damaged. Raising four
donnas under small-town vigilance requires peeling back postage stamps for secrets passed, so when his youngest is seduced and abandoned, “the hysteria behind men’s possessiveness” eventually stampedes the whole village. Germi’s predatory camera savors delicious morsels like corrupter Peppino prepping a plate of spaghetti as Don Vincenzo closes in on him. Twenty-five minutes of informed critic-speak melt in the face of six with Sandrelli, 2002, stunning still and making
amore to the camera to prove it. “It’s a man’s right to ask, a woman’s duty to refuse.”
Fists in the Pocket
($29.95) “My life has been a strong reaction to my bourgeois and Catholic adolescence,” confesses director Marco Bellocchio in the DVD booklet’s vintage interview. “The boy in
Fists in the Pocket is destroyed because he will not accept reality. His attempt to escape reveals not only decadent, but semi-fascist traits.” About his outrageous 1965 debut, the first-timer also cites Buñuel, while disavowing Rossellini, latter Visconti, and Fellini.
Fist‘s murderous splay of familial madness bears passing resemblance to the surrealist bent of early Polanski with a devilish foreshadowing of
Harold & Maude and was nearly banned as sacrilegious. Lou Castel’s Brandoesque method for expunging his dysfunctional brood (“It’s Sandro, from the Villa,” whispers one townie. “They’re all crazy out there”) is a marvel, matching Ennio Morricone’s subliminal soundtrack. The French are perverse because they can’t help it, but the Italians gave the world
La Traviata and Bernardo Bertolucci, whose brief video afterword for
Fists contextualizes the film’s overall final spasm of entitlement.
Amarcord
($39.95) Recipient of Fellini’s fourth Academy Award, 1973’s Best Foreign Film,
Amarcord represents the maestro’s late-career makeover of neo-realism. Lusty, festive, sentimental, and at times forced, this international box-office smash pulls reality out of a magician’s façade. Only through sound-stage superficiality does the film truly represent collective human experience. Bracketing his directorial breakout, 1953’s
I Vitelloni (a Criterion prize last year),
Amarcord dwells in the love/hate/mythology of his hometown, Rimini. Life’s major and minor chapters – school, family, the tobaccoist with enormous breasts – unfold into a slowly engulfing world of wonder. Not only does this 2-disc volume offer its label’s trademark generous extras, they combine for a laugh- and tear-inducing lesson on one of filmdom’s most individual visionaries. See Fellini’s hilarious “My Rimini” essay for the former and the 45-minute “Fellini’s Homecoming” doc concerning the latter, with the director’s sketchings and a half-hour audio interview last words on both. “God has made a great picture,” he says of this thing we call life.
This article appears in September 1 • 2006.
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