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Courtesy Cristaldifilm

A Theater Near You

Saturday, March 29, 2008
8:40 p.m. Divorce, Italian Style
Pietro Germi (Italy, 1961)

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(Divorzio all'italiana). Ferdinando Cefalú (Marcello Mastroianni) is a model member of Sicily’s good-for-nothing aristocracy: lazy and impossibly vain, he seems to spend most of his time skulking around his ancestors’ decrepit villa in pajamas, eyebrows smugly arched, mouth pulled into a perpetual pout under a fussy mustache. (“I really am an intriguing type,” he muses before the mirror.) Cefalú’s problem: he’s disgusted by his wife’s overbearing affections and smitten with a nymphet cousin. Divorce in Sicily is unthinkable, but the law is lenient in matters of honor; if Signora Cefalú were to take a lover, who could blame her husband for murder? Pietro Germi’s farce skewers every stratum of Sicilian society: busybody matrons, plodding mafiosi, self-serving clergymen who denounce La dolce vita as “lascivious art,” and all the upstanding citizens who sprint straight from church to the movie theater.

Divorce, Italian Style is repeated on Sunday, March 30.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti, Germi. Photographed by Leonida Barboni. With Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste. (105 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Janus/Criterion Collection)