User Reviews

This is a common story of mutually bored husbands and wives and mutual unfaithfulness, among Lombard middle-high class. However, it takes short time to prove not ordinary at all, filled as it is with subtlety by the artful direction and the acting by Martinelli and Gastoni. Most scenes are powerful reminders of how seemingly slight, and yet thick, the separation between commercial productions on the one hand and what Scorsese calls «true films» on the other is. (It is also a reminder of how in the past of Italian cinema a sexy actress was primely an actress, and additionally an enticing and arousing woman.) In spite of meager critical reception, if not obtuse silence, being the common attitude of critics towards it (a retribution suffered by the whole opera of Lattuada, in consequence of his unyielding denial to compromising his art with the mandatory intellectual fashion of the time — that which critics will always sanction keenly — as well as to greet and grant the wishes of mainstream audience) together with the riveted, elegant dismantling of society's hypocrisy (friendship is reduced to reciprocal competition and envy, «love making» to coupling for the sake of it, marriage to «what it is», a contract) Lattuada's psychological and scenical detailing, its atmospheric, pervasive bitterness, are what distinguishes the film.