/ Director
Pietro Germi
/ Cast
Stefania Sandrelli, Saro Urzì, Aldo Puglisi, Lando Buzzanca, Lola Braccini
/ Length
115 min.
/ Year
1964
/ Sponsor
San Diego Italian Film Festival
Date :: Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Time :: 7:30 pm
Location :: UltraStar Cinemas Flower Hill
Cost :: $7.50
Tickets :: Advance tickets available at the Box Office
-----------
Date :: Friday, April 9, 2010
Time :: 7:00 pm
Location :: MoPA
Suggested donation :: $5.00
Language :: Italian with English subtitles
Sedotta e abbandonata
Seduced and Abandoned
Preoccupations with the fast-paced development brought about by progress and modernity in the Italy of the postwar years were shared by many directors. While Olmi used an understated realist style, Germi adopted a baroque, purposefully excessive and hyperbolic form. In his commedie all’italiana, a genre he in many ways contributed to create along with Dino Risi, Pietro Germi chose to focus his attention particularly on moral and sexual customs. After the success of Divorzio all’italiana in 1961, Germi, born in Genova, returned to Sicily, where he had also shot his earlier, neorealist-inspired films like In nome della legge (1949) and Il cammino della speranza (1951), to make Sedotta e abbandonata in 1964. Whereas in Divorzio all’italiana, Germi exposed the absurdity of the code of honor, devised by a patriarchal society and sanctioned by the Italian penal code to control women’s sexuality, from the point of view of the inept Don Ferdinando Cefalù, played by an excellent Marcello Mastroianni, in Sedotta e abbandonata, he chose to focus primarily on the plight of the female main character, Agnese, played by a beautiful Stefania Sandrelli.
In this film Agnese is violated by his sister’s fiancé, Peppino, who then refuses to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. The film exposes the double standard of a society founded on male privilege, but it does so Italian-style, with plenty of humor, perverse twists and turns and satirical overtones. When after many tribulations Agnese’s father, played by the little known Saro Urzì, winner for best male actor at Cannes, succeeds in convincing Peppino to consent to marry Agnese, it is the young woman herself who stubbornly refuses her rapist with means of her own. The film makes use of all sorts of cinematic tricks to accentuates the hypocrisy and bitter comedy, from the use zoom, perfected by Germi to emphasize the grotesque physicality of the characters, to the acceleration of the action and the manipulation of the music score. Germi’s parody of the Italian honor code becomes an effective way to use laughter to criticize unjust sexual customs and conducts that have no logical explanation except the preservation of male privilege.
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