User Reviews

This film is a historical document of the living conditions of the workers from southern Italy that emigrated to the north of the country to work in the industries in Milan. The film gives a good idea of the north-south mentality clash in Italy. The workers from the north and the south may have the same political ideas, but when they go home to their families they are worlds apart. They can't undersatand each other,even when in love like the Lombard Nullo and the Sicilian Carmela, but they are united by death caused by the ruthless disregard for safety measures of the industry managers and of those (the doctor) that should look after the lives of the workers and not simply appease the interests of the owners. On a lighter note there are many scenes with interesting views on the period italian public and private transport. This is one of the films that demonstrate that Italy is not just "mafia, pizza and mandolin"!

At first glance this movie seems as though it will be about worker conditions and struggles— not an unusual subject for Italian films of the era—but instead those issues are backgrounded in favor of a rather frustrating culture-clash romance.

Giuliano Gemma is the Milanese factory laborer who falls in love with Stefania Sandrelli as a migrant from Sicily who also works there. She loves him, too. The trouble is that she's brought her very, very traditional values and hangups (as well as her even more traditional brother), which include strict ideas about propriety and "a woman's place" that to him seem somewhat daft. When her brother hits her for daring to see a "strange" man, she tells everyone her "fiance" hit her, because the former would be a source of shame, while the latter is a source of pride! She's constantly bursting into tears, changing her mind and frustrating Gemma's attempts to stabilize their relationship until you wish he'd just find someone better. (Although of course the other factory women are painted as worse options.)

This dynamic would work better as drama (and occasional comedy) if Tuscan native Sandrelli weren't miscast—she's just too chic and modern to convince as a southern peasant who can't escape the rather backward, servile notions of womanhood and marriage she was raised with. Gemma, as the suitor mostly bewildered by those values, is very good in a more muted ordinary-guy role than he typically played at the time.

The somewhat strained North vs. South Romeo & Juliet thing does come to a somewhat poignant if drawn-out conclusion (semi-SPOILER here) caused by the poor, even dangerous working conditions at the factory. "Crime of Love" is decent but uninspiring, and won't be very compelling to anyone who's not already a fan of one or both stars.

Luigi Comencini's unhelpfully titled Crime of Love is single-minded to a fault, but makes a walloping cumulative impact, rooted in fine personal and social detail. Nullo and Carmela (Giuliano Gemma and Stefania Sandrelli) both work at an emblematically awful Milanese factory, its employees mired in mind-numbingly repetitive tasks while often enveloped in toxic fumes; the mutual attraction is plain, but held back by Carmela's mercurial nature, based in a mixture of strategy and instinct and in the inherent impossibility of her situation. She's from Sicily, living with the rest of her family in a single room seemingly filled mainly with beds; Nullo's home in a more modern building, although also shared with parents and siblings, appears luxurious by comparison (plastic covering still on the couch; a fish tank); he's an anarchist who rejects the idea of a church wedding whereas she can't imagine anything else. And yet, she frequently demonstrates the inclination and capacity to be freer and more self-defined: she swings from not wanting him to enter her house because she's there alone to being the one who shortly afterwards initiates sex (and mentions that she's been on the pill ever since they met); she sets the tone and direction of things far more than he does, to his perpetual bemusement it seems. The film sometimes evokes Antonioni, depicting a world from which one could only possibly feel alienated (when she talks about wanting to go somewhere sunny, Nullo takes her to a swimming spot of his youth, now a polluted cesspit surrounded by garbage and dead birds), but Comencini's intentions are more straightforward, with Carmela ultimately a victim of just about everything there is to be a victim of (when her brother beats her up for coming home late and gives her a black eye, she tells people that Nullo did it, because that seems more respectable, and indeed earns him praise from some co-workers). The film ends on a startling act of protest, but one that barely registers, compared to the persuasively draining chronicle that precedes it.