Divorce Italian Style

In this black-comic masterpiece, director Pietro Germi delivers a diabolically subversive satire of the Italian family structure, Catholic piety, and male chauvinism. Sending up his own suave image, Marcello Mastroianni stars as the middle-aged scion of a faded aristocratic Sicilian family who pines after his younger cousin (Stefania Sandrelli). The problem: he’s married, in a country where divorce is illegal. Cue the murderous fantasies that drive him down an increasingly deranged path of self-delusion and self-destruction. Laying bare the absurd contradictions of bourgeois morality with each audacious twist, Germi serves up an acerbic portrait of a tradition-bound culture colliding with the unstoppable force of modernity.