Search - Divorce Italian Style (Dvd) on DVD

A film out of place in its time, but one for the ages

Matthew Watters | Vietnam | 07/01/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This brilliantly-observed dark comedy by director Pietro Germi outstrips anything Fellini ever made and ranks with L'Avventura and Il Gattopardo as one of my favourite Italian films. With one of the best scripts ever written in any language, filled with novelistic detail, the film is beautifully shot and features a wry, starmaking performance by Marcello Mastroianni. Skirting farce without ever falling in, it has this great Sicilian cultural specificity while, at the same time, applying a delicious acidity to universal themes of frustrated lust and soured marriage. The relative obscurity of Divorce Italian Style among modern film fans who lionise films by Fellini made around the same time in the early 1960s is confounding but perhaps rests in the fact that this film belongs to an old school of moviemaking based more on highly-structured narratives and attention to character than on some flashy deconstruction of cinematic rules. In structure, style, tone, and attention to craft, it owes more to Billy Wilder than it does to Michelangelo Antonioni. A must-see film."