Seduced and Abandoned

Rating NR Formats DVD Genre comedy Starring Stefania Sandrelli, Saro Urzì, Aldo Puglisi, Lando Buzzanca, Lola Braccini Directed by Pietro Germi Publisher Criterion Collection External Links Official Criterion Collection Website

Back in the 70's when cable first came to my hometown, my very Sicilian Aunt Mary set her watch by screenings of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (1975). The movie ran three or four times a day for nearly a month, but Aunt Mary never watched the whole thing. She simply marked off the time to the final five minutes of each screening. She stopped whatever she was doing so that she could run downstairs and catch the same few moments over and over again. These showed the now-rescued philanderer played by Giancarlo Giannini being beaten mercilessly by his overweight Sicilian wife. Aunt Mary never failed to get a belly laugh out of that sight.

If French farce is based on the principle of marking time by slamming doors, Sicilian humor marks it by slapping faces. Is this a self-defensive response to that island's violent past or is it just a matter of taste developed over years and years of commedia dell' arte slapstick? Who knows? The real question is whether or not it's funny. Like any other comic work, it's all in the handling.

Pietro Germi knew how to handle the swatting hand and the bellowing voice. He did this through surprise, split second timing, and an unerring belief that humor needs to serve a greater point if it is to have any resonance. Fortunately for him, that collision point between Sicily's customs and its laws provided him with fertile land for his homegrown humor.

Although he had a number of early important films to his credit, it's safe to say that Germi burst onto the international scene with Divorce, Italian Style (1961). Here, a dissolute baron (Marcello Mastroianni) wants a divorce in a Catholic Sicily that does not allow such a thing. Desperate, the baron comes across a loophole. It seems that it is all right to murder one's wife, just not divorce her. Using this very real law as a starting point, Germi launches into a critique of a country so illogical that it would not only stumble into this loophole, it would actually allow it.

Seduced and Abandoned (1964) is even more trenchant because it deals not only with idiotic laws but with the customs that allow them to be rationalized. Peppino (Aldo Puglisi) is engaged to the plump Matilde (Paolo Biggio). Horny and hardly turned on by his fiancé, Peppino takes advantage of the raging hormones of Matilde's beautiful younger sister, Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli). When word inevitably leaks out about the affair - and the attendant pregnancy - the girl's father, Don Vincenzo (Saro Urzi) tries to blunder his way through the customs and laws meant to protect family honor. Needless to say, all these laws can do is guarantee that dishonor along with a stew pot full of unhappiness.

A similar plot has been used countless times in countless melodramas. If Sicily had any snow at all it is a safe bet that Agnese would find herself thrown into it right quick. It is precisely this melodramatic structure that works so well for Germi. He works from the understanding that good farce is nothing more than melodrama turned up to 11. Both revel in the feelings and tragedies of humanity and both require a certain vicariousness within their audiences. The only difference is that one pushes to the point of tears, the other to the point of laughter. And Germi gets the difference marvelously right.

Germi's tale of primitive social customs beating up against a modern world is wonderfully portrayed in his sense of time and place. The dusty, centuries old Sicilian village so wreaks of stagnation that the modern dress and cars never fit comfortably into its schemes. Germi even manages some moments of near-poignancy in this battle between past and present. This is never truer than at our first meeting with a hapless baron (Leopoldo Trieste). His ancient privilege sorely mistreated by the modern world, the baron is first spotted while trying to hang himself. That he does so with such ignominious failure is as much a comment on his genetic inability to meet the real world as it is on Seduced and Abandoned's deft yet cynical sense of humor.

One point which does bear mentioning is that Seduced and Abandoned is a film of some violence. Playing at times like a summer stock version of Peyton Place starring the Three Stooges, Seduced and Abandoned indulges in more hits, slaps and eye gouges than can be counted. That a number of the most violent of these actions are perpetrated by men against their women in the service of family honor is a fact which can upset more modern sensibilities. Like any film, this is an element of the time and place from which it came and the violence shown is both reportorial and done with a specific social comment in mind. Beyond that, I can only quote my Aunt Mary: "Don't make opera out of it."

Criterion Collection's black and white 1:1.85 transfer is luminous and the single disk DVD comes with a number of good extras. Missing, though, is a commentary track. So much of what is presented is assumed by the filmmaker, but foreign to anyone not blessed with a Sicilian background. A commentary track could have filled in the social background and given some perspective where needed.