Ciúme à Italiana

This is one of the best Italian comedies ever made. Known both as A DRAMA OF JEALOUSY and THE PIZZA TRIANGLE, it is an engrossing farce about a love triangle in modern Rome. Bricklayer Marcello Mastroianni meets flower-seller Monica Vitti at a political demonstration. He decides to ditch his fat, older wife for her. All goes well until a pizza, in the shape of a heart, arrives. It is sent to the girl by a young pizza-chef, played by Giancarlo Giannini. The pizza man becomes Vitti's lover, and poor Marcello goes mad with jealousy and attempts suicide, as do each of the other two at some point in this hysterical soap opera. The three lead performers, among the best that the Italian cinema has ever had to offer, are magnificent, as is the direction and comic timing by Ettore Scola, whose DOWN AND DIRTY this would make an appropriate companion-piece to. One could call this movie "commedia all'italiana" with peppers, mushrooms, and cheese.

The Pizza Triangle is a cute enough Italian romantic comedy with some really outlandish touches around the center and a nicely scuzzy character played by the normally smooth Marcello Mastriani. These last two things would probably be trimmed tho (including its ending) would it have been a bigger hit in Italy and then remade for America so maybe its good it wasn't remade...but then again most people would have also heard of this and it'd be much more widely available to watch today as well so maybe that's not a good thing then.

Monica Vitti wildly overplays the fun loving/fast living woman at the center of the love triangle. She spots Marcello Mastriani not as the handsome man you normally see but as a drunk guy passed out on the street and instantly falls in love with him (i know but its a movie!) each one is sure they've seen each other before in a shop and were attracted to each other then so when she spots him laying in that gutter he's certainly pleased to wake up and see her standing over him. Unfortunately for her--he ends up being a wildly jealous boar who is prone to fits of both the drinking and temper kind and is soon turning her attentions to the swooning pizza maker in the little eatery that Mastriani keeps taking her to. The pizza maker played by a rather youngish Giancarlo Gianni woos her right under Marcello's nose with a slice of pizza in the shape of a heart---its a very cute scene when Vitti gets the heart shaped slice of pizza looks up and sees Gianni staring at her--its one of those meet cute scenes that would totally be at home in a big Hollywood romance (which is why i'm surprised this wasn't redone quite honestly) and while Vitti and her pizza maker start cuddling up Marcello starts questioning himself and his ability to hold a relationship and generally being a mope--except for when he's throwing one of his fits. Eventually he and the pizza chef (who already knew each other cause well Marcello eats his food) decide to try and share Monica Vitti--and as anyone who's ever seen Vitti in her prime can attest--half a Vitti is better then no Vitti at all.

The attempts at Jules and Jilm like comedy don't really mesh with the kind of angry, self righteous character that had been Mastriani's character up to that point, and you can pretty much guess where the film goes once the 2 guys decide to try and share Vitti. The movie doesn't quite live up to the first 5 or 10 minutes as a whole. When you see that sequence of Vitti at the fair and spotting Mastriani and then Mastriani seeing her--you think OK this is going to be very well filmed and is going to be passionate as all get out. It doesn't really pan out that way and not because of Mastriani's rather bitter character--its more because the film's attempts at humor are just too over the top to take seriously---Mastriani and Vitti share a fly together (mastriani's character is so filthy at the beginning that he keeps doing battle with the same fly--who Vitti then calls "our fly" and indeed whenever she starts to feel Mastriani's presence--you hear the fly buzzing on the soundtrack and sometimes see it actually flying around the screen as well--its a neat touch but one that's also irritating the more times it happens) Vitti's character herself is so over the top and so fickle--i personally stopped caring about which of the 2 suitors she's going to end up with long before she actually makes a decision (and then promptly changes her mind a couple more times for good measure) The film was enjoyable enough--its certainly pretty to look at for the most part--but the character's behavior and the fact that everything is done in these big broad strokes makes the rest of the film not as good as it could've been....the way Vitti carries on i would've thought that this was a role that Sophia Loren had turned down quite honestly--it wouldn't be hard to see why Loren would of turned this one down--the character that Vitti's playing is nowhere near the head strong, self sufficient larger then life characters that Loren had come to fame playing, and that's part of the main problem of the movie itself.

This is the passionate, tragic, acid, perversely funny story of a love triangle -- at one point, almost a ménage-à-trois -- involving bricklayer Oreste (Mastroianni in one of his very best performances, a sort of grotesque version of his character in "I Compagni"), flower-seller Adelaide (isn't it time we acknowledged Monica Vitti as THE most accomplished Italian comedienne ever? And being that gorgeous didn't hurt either) and pizzaiolo Nello (Giancarlo Giannini in a star-making role). With this film, Ettore Scola proved to be the great new voice in commedia all'italiana, a deserving heir to the maestri of this great tradition (DeSica, early Fellini, Germi, Monicelli, Risi) but adding steamier sarcasm and corrosiveness in his pitiless criticism of Italian society and its conservative mores.

We, as the audience, play a very important part here: it's to us (the invisible judge of a trial) that Oreste, Adelaide and Nello present their cases in the flashbacks that shows us the different angles of their convoluted story of friendship, love, betrayal and attempted murders/ suicides, in a sort of comedic Rashomon. The expertise of Scola's writing and the charisma of the starring trio make us care a lot for those hopeless losers, so unmistakably human.

Scola achieves a very rare thing: he uses caricature, comedic clichés and grotesqueness and raises them to refined art, craftily mixing tragedy and comedy with political overtones and social satire. This is on the same level as (and is a sort of cross between) Scola's masterpieces "C'Eravamo Tanto Amati" and "Brutti Sporchi Cattivi". You can do no wrong here: this is a delight that keeps your brain working AND your laughing muscles contracting, an achievement that sounds almost paradoxical by today's moronic, puerile standards of film comedy.

I loved seeing this at MoMA on 10/20/11. We first meet Monica Vitti & Marcello Mastriani at the closing down of a small ramshackle street fair/carnival in an ugly empty lot in Rome. She is urging the ride operator to give a longer experience & he has drank a bit too much after helping to tear down some of the exhibits & falls asleep awaking to Monica kissing on him. A romance begins amongst piles of plastic garbage & flies while he continues to go home to a wife who appears to be his mother. Flashbacks to recreating a crime for detectives take us back to the florid romantic affair complete with lush orchestrations featuring that electronic harpsichord so popular during this early 70's time period. What follows is a charming absurdly funny at times interesting story told in fascinating narrative involving characters turning to talk to us in the audience in order to inform us of different aspects of character & story that we otherwise wouldn't know - sometimes in theatrical spotlights - other times in extreme close-up. I particularly liked some of the sped up film & over amplified sound effects, esp. physical hits which gives the film that "slapstick" crazy kind of absurd playfulness. Other online reviews can give further insights into this enjoyable piece. I would say that this one is prime pickings for remake since it's distribution has been inconsistent & spotty at best.

The fact that Paul Frees seems to do all the men's voices except for Marcello Mastroianni's and Giancarlo Giannini's seems to add a certain sameness to all the other men in the dubbed version of this film. Mastroianni is a communist bricklayer in love with Monica Vitti and she with him. He's best friends with Giannini, a Communist pizza maker, who's in love with Monica Vitti and she with him. It's like a dirty joke about them commies, they share everything. Except being human, they can't. It drives everyone crazy and the movie is very funny.

There seems to be enormous amounts of real subtextual commentary lost in translation. Mastroianni has his middle left finger in a sling throughout the movie, and is occasionally found on trash heaps. Given that his character's name is "Oreste" I think there's a reference to the classical legend, but it's not the Homeric, Pindaric, Sophoclean versions, but the bogus Robert Graves Year-King, fighting over Monica Vitti. Mastroianni does have flies buzzing around him a lot, indicating he's the Old King.

Given three screenwriters, including Age and Scarpelli, and Ettore Scola directing (he had given Vitti her first screen role almost two decades earlier), there is obviously a lot in this movie that is both precisely of its time and of its place, ill suited to the sort of random translation that an Italian sex comedy got in the 1970s. Unless someone is willing to go back and do a more careful translation, there's little more than a funny and bizarre comedy here. However it certainly is that.