Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)

Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Odoardo Spadaro, Margherita Girelli, Angela Cardile, Lando Buzzanca, Pietro Tordi, Ugo Torrente, Antonio Acqua, Bianca Castagnetta, Giovanni Fassiolo. Screenplay: Alfredo Giannetti, Ennio De Concini, Pietro Germi. Cinematography: Leonida Barboni, Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Roberto Cinquini. Music: Carlo Rustichelli.

American movies were still trying to shrug off the morality enforced by the Production Code when Italy sent us the brilliant comedy about adultery and murder called Divorce Italian Style. And how ready Hollywood was to jettison that morality can be gauged by the fact that the film's screenplay won an Oscar, and that its director and star, Pietro Germi and Marcello Mastroianni, were nominated as well. The irony here is that Divorce Italian Style is about the consequences of a hidebound moral code, one in which murder could be condoned but divorce was forbidden. Germi and his co-screenwriters make the most of this irony, providing ingenious twists as Mastroianni's Ferdinando encounters multiple obstacles to his plans to rid himself of his wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), and marry the lovely Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). It's one of Mastroianni's greatest performances, made even more striking by the inclusion of a screening of La Dolce Vita, the 1960 Federico Fellini film that made Mastroianni into an international star, in the Sicilian town that is the setting of Germi's film. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian and Christine Boisson in Identification of a Woman

Niccolò: Tomas Milian
Mavi: Daniela Silverio
Ida: Christine Boisson 
Woman in Swimming Pool: Lara Wendel
Carla: Veronica Lazar
Nadia: Enrica Antonioni
Mavi's Sister: Sandra Monteleoni
Mario: Marcel Bozzuffi

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangeo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma
Production design: Andrea Crisanti
Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni
Music: John Foxx

As I said recently about his La Notte (1961), it helps when Michelangelo Antonioni has cast movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in his films because they provide something of a backstory to his often enigmatic characters. Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson, attractive and capable actors though they are, don't do quite enough to illuminate what's going on with Niccolò, Mavi, and Ida in Identification of a Woman. It's a film that plays almost like a parody of the movies that Antonioni and other directors made 20 years earlier: There's a party filled with bored Eurotrash like the ones in La Notte, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1961), and Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1962); there's a film director trying to get over creative block like Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963); there's a search for a missing woman, though not so fruitless as the one in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960); there are some mutterings about imponderable philosophical questions, such as whether god would exist if human beings didn't; and there's a good deal of sex, still not enough to overcome the problems of the characters, though the nudity is more frontal and the copulation more explicit than it was two decades earlier. In short, we've been here before. Still, Identification of a Woman is not without its rewards, most of them provided by the wizardly color cinematography of Carlo Di Palma. His artistry and technique are on display in such scenes as the film's most memorable segment, the journey through the fog, as well as in the play with reflections (see the still above) in the Venetian hotel scene. They do more than the actors do to bring the film to what life it possesses. 

Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987)

Woody Allen's warmest and maybe most irresistible film has none of the neurotic obsession gags or existentialist angst shtick that are so often associated with his work. It's a simple piece about the nostalgia that old songs evoke in us -- in Allen's case, reminiscences of the days when radio was the dominant, almost ubiquitous medium in people's lives, before television held people captive in their living rooms or the internet addicted them to the little screens of their cell phones or tablets. Specifically, it's Allen's childhood as seen through the eyes of young Joe (Seth Green) and his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker) and extended family. It's also, secondarily, a tribute to many of the actors who have enlivened Allen's films, with smaller roles and cameos filled by Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, Danny Aiello, Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton, and many others. Production designer Santo Loquasto deservedly received an Oscar nomination for his re-creation of Queens and Manhattan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but honors should go to the luminous cinematography of Carlo Di Palma, too. The soundtrack, supervised by Dick Hyman, ranges from such true classics as Kurt Weill's "September Song" and Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" to novelty pop of the period like "Mairzy Doats" and "Pistol Packin' Mama." As one born B.T. (Before Television), I can really dig it.

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Back in the day we would discuss for hours the significance of Thomas (David Hemmings) fetching an invisible tennis ball after having photographed an invisible murder. Then later we scrutinized the thematic relationship of Blow-Up to Antonioni's great trilogy of L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962). More recently, Blow-Up has figured large in discussions of the "male gaze." But lately it has become a historical artifact from a time and place half a century ago, the "swinging London" of the mid-1960s. And there I think it best belongs. What perhaps needs to be discussed is the tone of the film: Is it a document, or a celebration, or an exposé, or a satire? I think it is a bit of all of these, but mostly the tone is satiric. Thomas's aesthetic detachment, not to say voyeurism, makes him the perfect vehicle for an exploration of the era, from the grim flophouse he spends a night photographing to the drug-addled home of the wealthy, by way of a fashion shoot, a glimpse of what seems to be adulterous affair but may be a murder, a mini-orgy with some teenyboppers, a peek at two of his friends making love, and a performance in a rock club. All of it viewed with the impassive gaze of Thomas, Antonioni, and Carlo Di Palma's movie camera. Is it meant to be funny? Yes, sometimes, as when Thomas encounters the model Verushka at the party and says, "I thought you were supposed to be in Paris," and she replies, "I am in Paris." Or when we see the audience watching the performance of the Yardbirds in the club, showing no signs of enjoyment, but then going crazy when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and flings it into the audience. Thomas escapes from the club with a piece of it, eludes the pursuing crowd, but throws it away when he realizes it's worthless. (A passerby picks it up, looks it it, and tosses it away.) It's a portrait of a cynical era in which people, as Oscar Wilde put it, know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." Hemmings, with his debauched choirboy* face, is the perfect protagonist, and Vanessa Redgrave, at the start of her career, is beautifully, magnificently enigmatic as the woman who may or may not have been involved in murder. I'm not sure it's a great film -- certainly not in comparison to Antonioni's trilogy -- but it will always be a fascinating one.

*Almost literally: Hemmings started as a boy soprano who was cast by Benjamin Britten in several works, most notably as Miles in the 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw. He can be heard on the recording made that year with Britten conducting.