Word: mastroiannis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...something to sunder them at the end. But nowadays all the old reliable problems - differences of years, background and religion, for example - are carelessly surmounted all the time by lovers. So the search for something to deter, for a few reels, a middleaged, middle-class Marcello Mastroianni from turning his one-night stand with Nastassia Kinski, a spunky student, into a full-scale affair has led the creators of this film to bedrock taboo: the possibility of incest...
...Mastroianni has no sooner bedded the girl than he learns there is a chance that she might be his daughter, the issue of one of his youthful liaisons. The mother is long dead, and the truth is never definitively determined, but the scandalous possibility is not to be taken too literally anyway; it serves mainly as something for a naturally cautious, rather distracted male to employ as justification for his hesitations. Even without it the man evidently would come to resist the impulsiveness and vitality of his young lover. When she finally leaves him, it is not the taboo that...
...ends up so smitten that he resorts first to drugs, then to suicide in his despair over failing to gain possession of her. Marcello Mastroianni plays the one who ruined her when she was an adolescent, and still holds power over...
...fact is that of a sex farce, though its tone is more appropriate to a sentimental comedy. The disparity may arise because Director Marco Vicario (Homo Eroticus) can't quite manage the French trick of finding cuckoldry hilarious. The situation, at any rate, is satisfactorily ridiculous. Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a wealthy wine merchant, an idealist and a writer of tracts on the equality of women. He is also a great philanderer, with mistresses and bastard children all around Italy. But what has that to do with idealism...
...amusing, but not howlingly funny. A couple of reasons suggest themselves. One is that Antonelli has none of the fire in her eyes that might be expected of a revenge-bound wife in a farce. She plays her scenes as if they were high drama. Another is that Mastroianni, though not quite so sober, lets us see too much of the pain that an actual man would feel under such circumstances...