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Rating: Masterpiece of Italian comedy from 1961, it forms a Sicilian diptych with Sedotta e abbandonata (1963), which is later joined by Signore e signori (1965) in a triptych dedicated to the bourgeoisie.
Extraordinary in its expressionistically exaggerated portrayal of Sicilian society, lazily yet unconvincingly anchored to its myths and rituals, Divorzio is a desecrating, brilliant, and also formally interesting film, due to the director's original ideas.
Beautifully photographed in black and white, this film is built on a brilliant alternation of real-life scenes and possible life scenarios, with Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (a great Marcello Mastroianni) engaging in seemingly insane daydreams. However, as events will show, they are no crazier than reality itself.
The sharp satire takes off here thanks to the support of an obsolete article of the penal code, related to the "crime of honor"; it moves in that only seemingly narrow space between the permissible and the prohibited, in the uncodified; a space where the rigid "forms" of social life give way to the protean "life," to ingenuity, to subterfuge, to everything hidden behind masks. And the Pirandellian critical terminology is not an intrusion here (except for its conventionality), because we really find ourselves in the metaphorical and referential territories of the author of Il giuoco delle parti.
Hardened social roles are ridiculed to the point of becoming grotesque, just as in Pirandello's novels and plays, although in this form of humor Germi will reach the height of absurdity and perfection with Sedotta e abbandonata. The comedy here can be interpreted in the famous Bergsonian sense: it is funny what is not flexible, what is not adaptable, what stubbornly maintains its characteristics, even those that clash violently with circumstances, logic, nature, and society.
The baron's convoluted plan to eliminate his wife Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), and then marry the alluring Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), is absurd and thus comical, but it is the society in which the baron lives that is being mocked, as it is this very society that enforces unnaturalness, rigidity, and the stereotypical fixation of "roles." And here lies the baron's stroke of genius: to destroy the bonds that oppress him, he chooses to exacerbate them, to exploit them to his advantage. A great "lesson" in cunning, in adaptability within the micro-society in which he lives, although for us, the audience and inhabitants of the macro-society, his behavior remains laughable for the aforementioned reasons. The baron, hero of a form of anti-intelligence (or anti-hero of intelligence), can triumph thanks to his willingness to play the imagination's game, albeit with rules he did not decide but would never dream of changing.
Because, in the end, like all the Sicilians of Germi, he is a conservative and is too accustomed to it.
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