Séduite et abandonnée

A beautiful sixteen year old girl is seduced by her older sister's fiancée, a conniving would-be bureaucrat. How far will the tradition-bound paterfamilias go to restore the family's lost honor? Well, if you're writer/director Pietro Germi, the answer is pretty darn far—including perjury, kidnapping, murder, and bribing an eccentric baron with a new set of false teeth. Rarely has male hypocrisy and sexual double standards been so thoroughly lampooned. The film walks a fine line between comedy and tragedy, as the more and more traumatized sixteen year old girl is passed back and forth like damaged goods. Shot in beautiful black and white, on location. If you liked MAFIOSO, last year's great Italian rediscovery, you'll like this.

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.

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.

The best comedies, this film included, do more than simply crack jokes. They highlight the worst qualities of humanity for the ridiculous things they are and reveal the hidden idiosyncrasies in our assumptions.

The situation presented in the film is the a thing of overwrought dramatic soap operas and reality TV. A 15 year old girl falls for her older sister's finance and gets pregnant. What is unique about the humor in this film is the rest of the family's reactions. The father, Don Vincenzo is incensed, of course and demands that Peppino marry Aganese. To do this however, Vincenzo must chase him down and convince him to marry her and Peppino just doesn't want to marry a girl who might not be faithful since she has already demonstrated that she is susceptible to seduction, even if he was the seducer.

Convincing him might be easier if it wasn't for he fact that Don Vincenzo, while caring very much whether or not his daughter is wed, cares even more that all of this remain on the hush hush. He simply will not have the family name be dragged through the dirt, even if he has to lie, cheat, steal, or murder, to keep people from thinking the family is a bunch of degenerates.

This tug of war between people's conflicting desires is what makes this film so delightfully funny. I have no doubt that this film will join films like "Tampopo" and "Death of Stalin" in my regular rotation of films I enjoy showing people when we are all in the mood for a laugh.

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.