Séduite et abandonnée

The late Pietro Germi was one of the most gifted comic directors of the post-50s period. He is the man behind such wonderful movies like DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE; ALFREDO ALFREDO; SERAFINO; THE CLIMAX; THE BIRDS, THE BEES, AND THE ITALIANS. This hilarious movie, which may be his very best, is a loving yet deadly satire of Sicilian customs. The dejected heroine Agnese (played by Stefania Sandrelli) is seduced by her sister's fiance while she is chaperoning her snoozing sister during the sultry Sicilian siesta hours. She becomes pregnant and must succumb to a shotgun marriage demanded by her father. Problem: Sicilian seducers do not accept unchaste wives. It does not matter that HE seduced the girl. He has his honor. The father has honor too. This corpulent apoplectic domestic tyrant must also protect his family's "onore". For Verdi's Falstaff honor is a mere word. For this proud Sicilian father it is the foundation of our lives. Saro Urzi's performance as the father must be seen to be believed. Everyone else in the cast of this brilliant film is unforgettable as well. Carlo Rustichelli's musical score, like the one he provided for DIVORCE,ITALIAN STYLE is fabulous.

Criterion Collection was generous enough to introduce me to Germi's works, first starting with Divorce, Italian Style. It was only natural that I followed up with Seduced and Abandoned, since I was blown away by Divorced, and had a newfound love of contemporary European cinema, especially from French and Italian filmmakers. I know it's relatively simple to find out about little gems of work from foreign directors (using IMDb, for example), but I'm grateful for a company like Criterion to steer me in the direction of fantastic films and the visionaries that create them. Saves me a lot of time and effort, haha.

Now, I'm just some random nobody in his early 20's, born and raised on the prairie of Western Canada. In a sense, I may not be as "culturally perceptive" as someone hailing from a direct Old-World European background. But to discover a film such as Seduced and Abandoned, it was a guaranteed shock to see the enormity of differences between the values, traditions, and customs of Sicily compared to what I grew up in, astonishing since these worlds are separated only by a couple generations! Then again, forced marriage might be as frowned upon nowadays as if someone from that era might look into the future and see the overwhelming divorce rate of ours! It's really a subjectivity of time, where a brilliant, neorealist director, not unlike Germi, of our time will be able to capture a kind of absurdity in the way we deal with (or possibly lack thereof) now common principles and practices, such as infidelity, polygamy, same-sex unions, etc.

I'm rambling. Seduced was a depressingly good movie. Sardonic and whimsical at the same time, this one had the ability to leave a bittersweet taste with me afterward, to not dismiss the ideals held in Sicilian culture a couple generations ago, but to ponder them, to compare them to the beliefs and mores of our generation.

Sandrelli was phenomenal, as always. And I'm glad Germi cast Saro Urzi as the father instead of some North American counterpart, like Borgnine... Added to a certain authenticity that I wouldn't find if that'd been the case.

Lando Buzzanca as Antonio, and Leopoldo Triste as the Baron were amazing as the kind of actors that kept the comedic ball rolling in this type of film; although Seduced is known as a key player in the Comedia d'all Italiano, without these laugh-out-loud performances, the film would be a depressing portrayal of old Italian values and nothing but.

I look forward to the day when a company like Criterion will release more of Pietro Germi's film works (undoubtedly his 1950's dramatic working class oeuvre), to an international audience...

Until then.

In one moment, the father of this Sicilian family is with his buddies and computing the number of times a "real man" will ejaculate in his life (once per day between 18 and 60, so that's 42 years * 365 days, he reasons...), and in the next, he's calling his 16-year-old daughter a whore for even the idea that she's been with a man. The 1964 is a landmark film in calling out the double standard, especially when you consider the attitudes shown by real Italians in Pasolini's documentary from the same year, Love Meetings. It goes much further than that though, setting its sights on the shocking law that absolved a rapist of his crime provided he married his victim. In this case it's statutory and the girl has feelings for the fiance of her sister who aggressively came on to her until she gave in, but it's still very dark stuff.

Ironically the young girl is the one who feels guilty, not him, and she's berated by her priest and her father. As someone puts it, "It's a man's right to ask, a woman's duty to refuse," and the fact that she's not a virgin now makes her spoiled and unsuitable even in the eyes of the young man. It's a film that will probably make you pretty angry, and more than once. The father is sensitive in the extreme to what this does to his family's honor, and what the gossiping townspeople will say about them. The images that director Pietro Germi puts up on the screen of their leering, ugly faces, often shot in closeup or sullenly staring at a distance, make this a broader critique of Sicilian culture. Through zany action and humorous moments, he manages to make it feel not heavy though, which was a feat in itself. Great film.

Pietro Germi is probably my favorite director of commedia all'italiana films, but to understand him, we have to understand commedia all'italiana, and to do that, we have to examine its roots, which lie in the Italian neorealist movement.

Italian neorealism was forged out of the ashes of World War II. After suffering Mussolini's dictatorship and Italian Fascism, followed by Nazi occupation, followed by American occupation, Italy's identity as a nation had been decimated. The new identity it would build in the postwar years would be defined in every way by the war. In cinema, directors began shooting low-budget, inexpensive films with a realistic aesthetic. This was, on one hand, a product of necessity, due to the economic impact of the war, and, on the other hand, it was an artistic choice, since the neorealists believed in a cinema that echoed reality, which meant natural lighting, nonprofessional actors, and on-location shooting. In terms of the films' content, they often featured a deep sympathy with the working class, which was the hallmark of the Marxist school of thought that was quickly beginning to dominate Italian cinema. Having recently seen the other end of the political spectrum (i.e. fascism) up close and personal, the shift leftward to communism was virtually inevitable. The other notable aspect of these neorealist films is their highly melancholic tone and grim portraits of human despair. This, too, of course, was a result of the horrors seen during the war.

Time heals all wounds, however, and by the mid-'50s, Italians were ready to wake from their doldrums and shake off the depression that had marked the years immediately following the war. Italian cinema would have to adapt. For a nation that was finally ready to laugh again, the influx of comedy into Italian films was only natural. And so the '50s saw the rise of a very unique brand of comedy that would come to be called commedia all'italiana ("comedy Italian style", borrowing its name from Germi's own 1961 film, "Divorce Italian Style").

Italian cinema now had the money and the motivation to make more commercial, more traditionally entertaining films, and while the neorealist mode of filmmaking had largely vanished by the mid-'50s, it survived through commedia all'italiana, which can best be described as an amalgam of the social realism that dominated the neorealist movement and a more conventional comedy. Commedia all'italiana, in a way, can be seen as half comedy, half neorealism, and while infusing neorealism with comedy may not sound like a good mixture, this blend of styles actually created some of the most enjoyable films in Italian cinematic history.

The directors who made films during the era of commedia all'italiana, for the most part, had apprenticed under the neorealists, and as a result much of the neorealist approach permeated their films. While the films they made were certainly comedies, they retained a poignancy, and an element of pathos, that was characteristic of Italian neorealism, and which transcended the conventions of comedic filmmaking. These filmmakers, like many of the neorealists before them, were largely communists, although it's been suggested that many only joined the party in an effort to further their careers.

And this, at last, brings us to Germi. Unlike fellow commedia all'italiana filmmaker Mario Monicelli, who was a committed, lifelong communist, Germi considered himself a social democrat. In other words, he believed in social equality, as did the left, but refused to subscribe to any specific political ideology. Germi and Monicelli both delivered indictments of society in their films, but unlike Monicelli's films, which operate on a sympathy with the working class, Germi's films are an attack on traditional, conservative values in Italian culture, specifically in the south.

While Monicelli's films tend to take place in Rome or northern cities like Turin, the films I've seen by Germi are set in Sicily, where conservative values regarding female chastity and familial honor were, certainly at the time of the film's release, at a maximum. Germi's films seem to revolve around individuals who are compelled toward unscrupulous choices and ultimately cast into a state of chaos by the rigid values of the society they live in. In "Divorce Italian Style", the protagonist lives in a Sicilian society that will not allow him to divorce (not without losing his honor and shaming himself as a cuckold), and so the only course of action left to him is to murder his wife (a comic premise, of course). In "Seduced and Abandoned", the patriarchal head of a family goes to absurd lengths to try to preserve his family's good name by covering up the corruption of his daughter's virtue at any and all costs.

In both films, we have a scenario in which completely normal, or at least non-calamitous events (the failure of a marriage, consensual sex between a fairly young man and a girl on the verge of adulthood) are elevated to a state of complete catastrophe by what Germi sees as society's ridiculous values and mores. "Seduced and Abandoned" is a scathing assault on these kinds of social mores, and despite Germi's refusal to engage a specific political doctrine, it is very much a political film. What makes it so successful, like "Divorce Italian Style", is the way Germi is able to execute his films in such a way as to make them enjoyable on two levels: as a meaningful reflection on the flaws and shortcomings of Italian society, and as pure, lighthearted, comedic entertainment. As the viewer, we have the prerogative of choosing which level to absorb. I recommend both.

RATING: 8.33 out of 10 stars

It is so rare to watch a funny masterpiece with so many insights! Sicily in the 50's appears obsessed with a twisted concept of honor, or, better, of an impeccable APPARENT reputation. No other movie I have seen is able to give such a vivid idea of the double morality for men and women that ails the "cultura machista". The character I love most in the movie is the extremely naive sister of the protagonist, who lives in her romantic world and does not realize what kind of tragicomic events are happening around her. In a word, truly a masterpiece.