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"Divorce Italian Style" (1961), "Seduced and Abandoned" (1964), "The Birds, the Bees and the Italians" (1965): three milestones of Italian comedy, three satirical portraits of the vices, hypocrisies, and bad habits of the provinces (Sicilian and Venetian), which constitute the best of Pietro Germi, the "humorist," and acerbic moralist of the sixties and seventies.
"Seduced and Abandoned" stands out from the other two for a more scathing and sarcastic tone, for a richer and almost congested narrative progression, for the particularly virulent strokes with which the director and the screenwriters (Age, Scarpelli and Luciano Vincenzoni) outline a hellish picture of a sun-drenched and somber Sicily, anchored to archaic codes of honor and dominated by an atavistic hypocrisy.
The themes are the same as its predecessor, that "Divorce Italian Style" which, by denouncing with the weapons of satire and black humor, the cultural and legislative backwardness of Sicily (and Italy), achieved a resounding and well-deserved international triumph, aided by Marcello Mastroianni's histrionic performance. For the rest, the film follows a different path: no longer a subtle, ironic, and perfectly calibrated comic mechanism, but a violent romp of grotesque and paroxysmal situations, aligned one after the other, sometimes with frantic emphasis (especially in the second part), sometimes with a calmer rhythm.
In the complicated story of betrayals, quarrels, and above all, of family and personal honors to defend (everything starts from the clandestine sexual relationship between the sixteen-year-old Agnese and Peppino, her sister's fiancé, but the plot is so rich with twists and ancillary situations that it would be very difficult to summarize it in a few lines), Germi completely lets loose that tendency towards expressionistic distortion which had already appeared, more controlled, in his previous works. Starting from the unforgettable figure of Agnese's father, sketched by the robust character actor Saro Urzì, the characters in "Seduced and Abandoned" are ugly and disagreeable masks who scream, sweat, and flail in the name of one single imperative: the defense of their own respectability. Not the bigoted respectability of upright Venetian bourgeois against whom the director would lash out his wrath in "The Birds, the Bees and the Italians," but an archaic conception of family and personal honor that is an integral part of Sicilian customs, an urge to keep the "good name" clean that drives the protagonists (none excluded, not even the very young Agnese played by Sandrelli) to the most absurd and abject actions, such as forced marriages and murders, and that radically precludes the possibility of any authentic feeling, including love, understanding, and solidarity.
That said, it is equally true that the Sicily of this film has almost completely lost the naturalistic traits still present in "Divorce Italian Style": this Sicily by Germi is now much more distorted, almost imaginary, an earthly hell with archaic and tribal connotations (as emphasized by Carlo Rustichelli's soundtrack), which seems almost deliberately constructed by the director as a pretext for his satirical invectives. A "flaw" in the setup that clashes with the explicit intent of denunciation and that, along with the improperly calibrated rhythm, the overly insistent taste for the grotesque and excess, and, in general, a certain tendency to go over the top, makes "Seduced and Abandoned" overall a not entirely successful film.
Yet, few other directors in Italy could have, like Germi, maintained such a high level of tension and interest in the viewer for over two hours of baroque, overabundant, and deliberately unpleasant filmmaking; made psychologically credible characters that appear caricatured and one-dimensional; and conveyed their message with such clear precision nonetheless. And in the end, we can still say that we are in the presence of a great film: perhaps less beautiful than "Divorce Italian Style," yet beautiful in a different way.
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