Divorce Italian Style (1961)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It's really a masterpiece but Daniela Rocca is not at all ugly, like another guy wrote, watch her well in the movie. And, she's a great actress. I would have liked to start with Marcello or Stefania, who are more beautiful than ever and do some extraordinary roles. There are no words to express how wonderful they are. Margherita Girelli is really delicious in the role of Sisina. And Angela Cardile, gorgeous in the role of Agnese. Leopoldo Trieste, Lando Buzzanca and everyone else, are not at all inferior. Germi's direction is brilliant. The story is more than captivating. Carlo Rustichelli's music is tremendous. A film worth seeing at any time, is one of the absolute masterpieces of the 7th art. Me, I've seen it so many times that I do not know exactly how many...

DIVORCE Italian STYLE is a comedy drama about love pains and problems with laws.An impoverished Sicilian nobleman is married with an unattractive but devoted wife. However, he is in love with his, a much younger and attractive, cousin. He lives, besides his wife, with his elderly parents, his spinster sister and her boyfriend. The divorce was illegal in Italy at that time. He has, unsuccessfully, tried to move away from his wife. Perhaps he will try to kill his wife?! A young cousin is so beautiful. He has a very little time to come up with something. A local story of a woman who killed her husband in a rage of jealousy has gave him a great idea...This satirical farce, which includes an affair in a marriage, love for a minor girl and a murder of honor is, in spite of moral transgressions, a very interesting film. Mr. Germi has made a series of wonderful plots, in which he has, in a satirical manner, criticized laws in the Italian society. He has, very imaginatively, combined fantasies with reality. Therefore, the malicious actions of the main protagonist seem quite charming. A happy ending is the culmination of irony.Scenery and music completely correspond with love pains in this film. Characterization is very good.Marcello Mastroianni as Ferdinando Cefalù is a sympathetic and cunning man at the same time. He, perhaps, goes through a midlife crisis. However, his ambitions and plans, which he has prepared with a large dose of elegance and serenity, are quite childish. His character is filled with pathos, despair and longing. Mr. Mastroianni has offered an excellent performance, which is the foundation of a top class entertainment in this film.His support are Daniela Rocca (Rosalia Cefalù) as his boring wife, Stefania Sandrelli (Angela) as his passion, lust and love and Leopoldo Trieste as Carmelo Patanè as his "salvation".This is a very entertaining movie about love torments and...still "natural laws".

This is a very fun film starring Marcello Mastroianni by director Pietro Germi (both received Oscar nominations) which received the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen Oscar in 1963, as well as numerous other awards.Ferdinando Cefalú (Mastroianni) is married to Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), a woman who is suffocating him with her love. They live in a large Italian family villa such that his beautiful 16 year old niece Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), to whom he is irresistibly drawn, lives across the courtyard from him.He witnesses a court case about a woman who has murdered her philandering husband and fantasizes about ridding himself of his own wife. However, he must figure out how to get away with it so that he will only have to serve a short time behind bars ... in order to be young enough to pursue his comely niece. When he learns of his niece's attraction to him, he plots to find a lover for his wife to justify her murder.You can almost watch the entire thing without sound. Of course, it's in Italian with English subtitles. Funny, slapstick humor abounds.

Let me begin by declaring that I liked "Divorce, Italian Style"...sort of. I come to both bury and praise this movie at the same time, if such a thing is possible.It's not a bad film, by any means. In fact, it possesses many of the greatest strengths of foreign cinema - it's got plenty of wit, bite, intelligence, and the kind of cold insight into human nature that is often lacking in glamorized Hollywood films. In short, it's well done.And yet, it annoyed me. Something about the enormously cynical plot - which involves an unhappily married man (Marcello Mastroianni) trying to break free from his clingy wife - bugged me. Perhaps I got just tired of Marcello's world-weary persona after a while; it initially amused me, then started to grate. It's tough to watch such a superficial weed of a character for a whole movie.And perhaps I also got a little tired of the wife, who is depicted as an endlessly cheerful weirdo with a hideous unibrow and a mustache. Cheerful, and fawning. Extremely fawning. In fact, the film contains innumerable close-ups of her fawning face. But here's the problem - how many shots of a fawning woman with a hideous unibrow does any normal viewer want to see? After a while, it just got too ugly for me to look at.Perhaps I'm being frivolous. But I'm trying to suggest, in my own clumsy way, that the movie was a little too grotesque for me. The characters were a little too bizarre, the shouting was a little too loud, and the satire narrowly missed the mark. I wanted to like it, really... but it ended up irritating me. Shame, really - but I'm sure that many Italian movie buffs will love it despite my grumblings.