Word: germi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl stumbles from the path of virtue into a nightmare of brutal Sicilian social codes in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which makes his wildly wicked Divorce-Italian Style seem an exercise in restraint...
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl stumbles from the path of virtue into a nightmare of brutal Sicilian social codes in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which makes his wildly wicked Divorce-Italian Style seem an exercise in restraint...
Having established the innocence of his angel (Stefania Sandrelli), Germi first thrusts her into an earthy peasant farce. One midday siesta she is seduced and becomes pregnant. Her father, played with inexhaustible bravura by Saro Urzi, consults a lawyer cousin, explaining that the doctor has brought up a little problem about Agnese. "Tumor?" asks the cousin. "Honor," growls Don Vincenzo. He sends his only son Antonio to murder the seducer, assured that the boy's punishment will be no more than three to seven years in prison, provided he can prove that he killed "in a blind rage...
...this point, the comedy brims with drolly catalogued details of village and family life. The laughter fades as Germi shows, in scene after scene, how ignorance, hypocrisy and habit can transmogrify normal human problems into sunny Sicilian-nightmares. Trying every tactic from simple perjury to a trumped-up kidnaping, Don Vincenzo struggles to marry off Agnese and salvage his honor, for his worst fear is that he might become an object of ridicule in the piazza. "We are an old family," Don Vincenzo tells the police. "I admit we've had some violent deaths-but outside...
Abandoned emerges as an erratic but deeply affecting work by an artist able to project a commonplace theme with blinding brio. Germi leavens his anger with compassion, lightens compassion with humor. And one pointed vignette embodies all three: a hard-pressed chief of the carabinieri, studying a wall map of Italy, impulsively flattens his palm over the entire island of Sicily and utters a long, long sigh...