Antonio and Zuleika

Zuleika Dobson (1911) is an outrageous satire by Max Beerbohm, caricaturist and author. Some see it as a simple poofy love song to Oxford, while the recent exhibit at the NYPL describes it as a biting lampoon of the cult of celebrity. I think it’s sort of both, but the satire certainly bites deeply. Bell’ Antonio (1960) is a cinema adaptation by Bolognini of another outrageous satire with the same name, written by Brancati of Sicily, and published in 1949. The film is good, but tamps down the spirit of the novel a great deal. The two stories have a weird symmetry between them.

Zuleika, an ordinary girl who has made a fabulous career as a third-rate magician comes to Oxford to visit her grandfather who is on the staff there. The secret of her success is that all men are passionately attracted to her on sight, despite the fact, we are told, that she is a young girl only conventionally pretty, and with no great gifts of conversation, charm, or intellect. She, on the other hand, finds the universal adulation of the males convenient and profitable, but boring. She is incapable of loving any of her slavish admirers, and so she falls for one undergrad, The Duke, who, at least at first, seems aloof and immune to her spell. That brief idyll of love ends quickly when he too declares himself her devoted lapdog and announces that since he cannot have her love, he will kill himself. The Duke is the hero of all the Oxford men – he is handsome, fabulously rich, well-dressed, speaks five languages, is academically brilliant and always perfectly correct – so they all proclaim that they will follow his lead. Eventually, the entire undergraduate population does commit suicide, to which the Oxford faculty and Zuleika have no great reaction: She decamps and goes on with her life.

Antonio is a young bachelor of about thirty considered by all, men and women alike, to be an absolute Adonis. Women swoon over him on sight, whether at mass or on the street. Those of lesser respectability offer themselves to him immediately; the more upper class hesitate a bit first. His romantic exploits, real and simply rumored, are legendary, but he seems unaccountably cool about it all, never reveling in the sexual opportunities thrown at him by women, young, old, ugly, beautiful, rich, and poor, and not joining in very much in the man-to-man vulgarity that surrounds all discussions of sex and romance. On the urging of his parents, he agrees to marry a local (rich) girl after glimpsing her in the street and being overwhelmed by her beauty. The only problem is that he is impotent.

He has been impotent for some time, but with all the women around him, no one ever guessed. He truly loves his bride, and she is young, and so cloistered, that it takes her a few years of unconsummated marriage to realize things are not right between them. (A few coarse words from a servant help her see the light.) Her family has the marriage annulled and she marries a man even richer than she. Antonio is humiliated by the scandal, and his father, a randy fellow in his day, cannot fathom that he has produced such a son. Antonio is buried under an avalanche of letters from women who are convinced that, now that he is free again, they have what it takes to get his equipment running in good order again. He is appalled and disgusted by their advances, and notes with bitter irony that they are using all the tricks common to any Don Juan trying to seduce virgins. The gender tables have turned.

The film is more subdued than the novel, leaving out all the political satire of the fascist regime, which closely associated itself with Italian machismo, and adopting a rather melancholy tone in place of the free-wheeling comedy that takes up much of the very funny book. Marcello Mastroianni is wonderful as Antonio, another of his portrayals of a man adrift in his society and sexuality.

Can we say that Zulieka and Antonio are both impotent cynosures for the other sex? She, incapable of love, he incapable of sexual consumation?

Divorce Italian Style

This film is a pitch-perfect satire of male chauvinist culture.  The photography is wonderful, the plotting is hilarious, and Marcello Mastroianni is simply fabulous as the smug, morally corrupt, defunct aristocrat in a Sicilian backwater.

The Baron lives in a decrepit palace that he shares with his wife and another branch of the family – the rest of the building is unused because they haven’t the money to keep it up.  His father is a filthy minded gambler, his wife is a voluptuous, dark-haired southern woman (they all have faint moustaches) who is childishly and effusively loving.

He despises her now, having married her in a moment of weakness brought on by her marvelous hips.  He is lustfully infatuated with his sixteen year old first cousin, a fair-skinned blonde vision of loveliness.  On a family outing to the beach, he takes a break from the sun to retreat to a flowery glade where she is gathering blossoms.  It is their first loving encounter – the cool, lush hollow makes a stark contrast to the blazing sun and white sand where the families remain.  Is it real, or a dream?

  

Divorce is not legal – the baron’s only recourse is murder.  He dreams of liberation from his fawning spouse, and hatches a plan to lure her into adultery with a long-lost admirer who returns as a professional

 

art restorer at work on the palace.  A local trial of a woman who shot her adulterous husband gives him the idea – crimes of passion and of honor are approved in his world.  The woman, she is a woman after all, was given only eight years.  Certainly, he will get off lightly with less than three:  after all, he is a man, an aristocrat, and he has a college degree!  The defense lawyer was marvelous:  he will be sure to retain him.

The ironies of the presentation are many-layered.  We know that the baron is a selfish and corrupt brute, despite his slick exterior, but we can’t help rooting for him as he plots his crime.  His wife and her silly lover are so stupid and absurdly melodramatic, not to mention the fact that the lover is a philanderer with a family and that he can’t keep away from the palace serving girl.

We watch the story from several points of view:  the neutral camera view; the baron’s point of view, guided by his self-serving narration;  and the point of view of the male-dominated local culture, expressed in the soaring melodrama of the defense attorney’s speech which the baron hears in his head as he executes his plot.  The bombastic legal schtick is a brilliant counterpoint to the limp but determined evil character of the baron.  The lawyer’s script is balanced by the sermons of the local priest who unctuously reasons out why the congregation must vote for the Christian Democrats: democracy + Christ – spokesman everywhere reinforce the oppressive status quo.  The oppressive heat is a visual metaphor for the suffocating power of social convention.

The baron’s planning is given a luck break when Fellini’s movie, La Dolce Vita, comes to town.  The entire population buys tickets to see the orgiastic cinema spectacular, but his wife does not wish to attend.  Aha!  She will have a tryst with her foolish lover, and the baron can catch them in the act, shoot her, and be done with it!  Of course, Marcello Mastroianni is the star of the movie, lending a delicious self-referential irony to the entire affair – we never see him on    

screen, that is, not in that  movie, on this screen!  The stolid audience is not impressed by the hifalutin antics of Fellini’s cinema.  Things are very simple down there in Sicily.  People are more impressed by another sort of spectacle, such as that trial of the woman who shot her husband.  The defense attorney entrances them…

There are many little touches of humor and irony throughout.  A favorite of mine is when the baron finds his wife’s cache of mementos from earlier days, souvenirs of her romance with the artist.  We see his imaginings of their affair, a photo shoot in some ancient ruins.  He examines the picture:  It’s terribly blurred!  What an awful photographer!  What kind of a souvenir of love is that?  Just what sort of evidence…is…this?

The baron gets his wish, it all works out for him.  His wife dead, a short stint in prison, and a wedding to his delectable cousin.  He’s all set up to be a cuckhold, for real, this time!