This film starts with a quick and sudden seduction of a 16 year-old girl
named Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) by her sister’s fiancé named Peppino (Aldo
Puglisi). After a large meal, everyone is konked out except for Peppino and
Agnese. He grabs her and takes her into a back room where unseen things take
place. She is quickly thrown into a tizzy by these proceedings and her
suspicious behavior is picked up by her mother….who in a fit of fearful
anticipation….ahem….takes an examination of her daughter and determines, yes
she has not only lost her virginity, but is also pregnant. Of course her father
Don Vincenzo Ascalone (a fantastic Saro Urzi whose performance is pure brilliance) soon becomes a raging lunatic: banishing her
to the basement (where she is forced to beg to use the bathroom), pursuing
and threatening the sexual predator and trying to force him into marrying the
girl, concocting a scam in which his other daughter can get a replacement
fiancé, and generally trying to maintain some sense of rule and order within
his clan.
This film is one of the best comedies that I’ve seen in sometime and it came out of nowhere for me.
I had literally no expectations when sitting down to watch as I'd never heard of it. Much of
the comedy comes at the satirical expense of Catholic traditions, and familial
honor. The father’s sweaty, exasperated attempts to keep his daughter from
ridicule and to allow the family name to have some semblance of respect is really the
meat of the film. I’m sure that today, this film wouldn’t quite work
in the modern sense....it's too morally antiquated for that. But seen as a nostalgic look back at a simpler time, it is
really funny. Germi even includes plenty of surreal dreamlike sequences, adding
a bit of the "Bunuel" to the proceedings. However the aim here is far more
lowbrow and common than Bunuel. Germi is aiming at the gut.
Aiochi Parolin’s magnificent and crisp b&w cinematography adds an
artistic bent, but not so much that it makes the film inaccessible. The visuals always
seems at the behest of the comedy, not from any sort of artistic pretension.
The use of the fish-eye camera at times adds to the circus-like proceedings. Germi, though, is careful never to dig the knife in too deeply. You can sense the
affection for Italians here and he’s never particularly mean. These events are
shown in a light in which the conniving and the ridiculing never quite overcome
the power of the family and one comes away with an admiration for the zeal and
care for which the father breaks his back for his family. His love is real and
the family is the heart of the matter. What a joyful and funny film this
is.
