Bryan Forbes
La Fabbrica Delle Mogli

THE REVIEW

Bryan Forbes - The Stepford Wives (1975)

This little gem was ahead of its time: based on a 1972 novel by Levin, aka The Stepford Wives and resurrected very shitty in the remake The Perfect Woman, it is a feminist fantasy-horror tinged with melancholic irony.

Many of today's guys will still find in a residual corner of their male chauvinist souls those messianic expectations of the husbands in the film of a beautiful, good, capable housewife who always says yes. The film takes off with gradual suspense, under the opiate cloak of a 70s atmosphere, eerily poised between thriller and science fiction, with an unpredictable ending in which the perfect housewives of an American town turn out to be androids built by a husbands' club directed by the mad scientist of the moment. The message is ultimately apocalyptic: despite libertarian ambitions, battles for sexual equality, the woman is a creature made in the image created by man, father and master who makes and unmakes her destiny according to patriarchal codes and revelations, almost as if they were indisputable religious revelations.

The wives are indeed manufactured as perfect copies of the real wives, and the latter are obviously disposed of once cloning is complete: feminism, the myth of Pygmalion and/or Pandora, or the biblical myth of Eve derived from Adam's rib, implicitly depicts a violent and technocratic revenge of male chauvinism in the film. A precursor of Romero's Zombies, a veiled satire of rampant consumerism, a prophecy on feminism, and on women returning to being objects despite efforts, the film lends itself to various interpretations.

Note in the final scene the android's breast -Katharine Ross- is visibly redone, inflated and improved, a silicone déjà vu of the future. Like the Italian patriarchal fallback on marriages to foreign women, whether community or not, as long as they are economically submissive, given that Italian women, paraphrasing Quartullo, no longer want to... And what about the robotic showgirls, showgirls, little whores, made in series for footballers or the inveterate, stereotypical, parkinsonian, plasticized hag seniors that dominate television - like Milly Carlucci who no longer budges? Or sphinxes of liposuction and plastic surgeries like Muti, Sandrelli, and the botulinum gang? Ah yes, the Divine Artificial Creature slipped out of the Creator's hands. Or the very parliamentarians, politicians, priests, pimps, incarnations of priests, who have governed Italy for thousands of years.... Aren't we all clones, all look-alikes, all androids of Andreotti?

How many men, husbands, or boyfriends, have not for a moment dreamed of marrying one of the Stepford wives, that is, a beautiful, non-problematic wife who takes care of the house and kitchen, roundly soft like a Battisti-era apple—Except perhaps we'd get a little bored... but how many fewer freak-outs? Of the series I have the slave and you don't? ehhh my cheeky ones...