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Monday, February 6, 2023

IL BELL' ANTONIO / BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO (1960)

From the darker side of commedia all'italiana, Marcello Mastroianni is ‘Beautiful Antonio,’ handsome & marriageable, with the reputation of a womanizer, who thinks he’s finally found ‘the one’ when he meets the equally beautiful Claudia Cardinale.  If only he could ramp things up beyond kissing & cuddling after the wedding.  Turns out, Mastroianni suffers from acute Madonna & the Whore syndrome, even more than most proper Sicilians.  Church sanctioned coitus as cancel culture.  And as Cardinale doesn’t believe they’re truly wed without consummation, she needs priestly consultation to figure out just what her position should be.  (Fortunately for Marcello, 'whore' might apply to chambermaids.)  Director Mauro Bolognini, who never hit the international awareness threshold of commedia all'italiana masters like Pietro Germi and Mario Monicelli (both out with a Mastroianni classic in the next few years*), is nearly as fine here, though not as distinctive a filmmaker.  But working off a trenchant screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and finding a mordant vein that skews away from Pasolini in a more comic third act (largely the work of co-scripter Gino Visentini?), Bolognini impresses.  As does the entire production.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Those classics being DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’62 (the best known commedia all'italiana) and THE ORGANIZER/’63 (the most underappreciated). https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/divorce-italian-style-1962.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-compagni-organizer-1963.html

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