Italy, France, 1960
Directed by Mauro Bolognini
With Marcello Mastroianni (Antonio Magnano), Claudia Cardinale (Barbara Puglisi), Pierre Brasseur (Alfio Magnano), Rina Morelli (Rosaria Magnano), Tomas Milan (Edoardo), Patrizia Bini (Santuzza), Ugo Torrente (Mr. Puglisi)
It started pleasantly but then becomes shocking. The party Antonio Magnano attends at the lavish home of one of those powerful men who shape the public life and the economic prosperity of Catania, behind close doors and out of reach of the common people and the media, has been organized to congratulate a lawyer elected deputy to the national parliament. The bespectacled and serious young man is soon urged to have a good time with a gorgeous and teasing blonde. He is even blamed, especially by Antonio Magnano, for refusing to get outside the living room and inside a bedroom to prove his virility as part of this celebration of his new career. The guest should do right away and without fussing, Antonio Magnano argues, if only to dispel the rumor Antonio Magnano’s cousin Edoardo discreetly evokes – that lawyer may not be fully a man, just a gay. Peeved, the deputy takes the blonde out of the frame while the following shots display once again how unashamedly aroused and pathetically macho the party host and his friends are.
It started predictably and soberly but then becomes shocking and crucial. The funeral of the grandfather of the pretty young woman Antonio Magnano is engaged with, Barbara Puglisi, is taking place in the streets of Catania. But the conversations among the people following the hearse and those watching the file of mourners from the sidewalks and the balconies prove to have little to do with the dead and show little respect and emotion as it should be in such circumstance. Every word is about the way the lovers should behave, how they look, and especially how beautiful and exciting Barbara Puglisi is and how lucky, but badly needing now to rise to the expectations associated with progeny and prosperity, Antonio Magnano is.
It seems it has always been like that in fact. This is inescapable, this is accepted, this is fine. Manliness, the power to seduce, the urge to sleep with any woman, the celebration of sexual performance and domination are a defining trait of the Italian man, especially in the South, and should be acknowledged as such and viewed as a benchmark, held as a mirror, turned into legitimacy. To boast of mistresses and orgies is decent but to skip the topic is not normal. To marvel at how attractive a man is sounds natural, even expressed in too effusive, embarrassing, actually vulgar, words, but to ignore the evidence is not normal. To speculate about what a man’s semen can do is logic but to avoid the discussion is not normal.
This virility so crudely and blatantly reduced to sex and seduction, male conquest and animal breeding, is also organically associated with wealth and power. Mating is a safe road to financial security or enrichment. It allows connections safeguarding a family name – and humbling an enemy. This is unquestionable and to remain unchallenged – the only real danger is indeed whether a man’s virility is actual or not, but even this looks a moot point as no man, and certainly no old father, like the determined, stubborn, fierce father of Antonio Magnano, Alfio Magnano, could even conceive such a failure. When Mr. Puglisi, Barbara Puglisi’s father, dares to tell Alfio Magnano this is nevertheless the issue with Antonio Magnano, a conflagration is inevitable, starting the tragic second part of the film, the fight about Antonio Magnano’s failure to have a child and to make his wife happy coming after what had the look of an idyllic romance concluding the return to Catania of a prodigal son who had so much success in Rome.
How successful in Rome Antonio Magnano was is a matter of mystery for the audience. The first images showed him listening, mute, and powerless, to a crying woman who cannot understand why their affair is such a failure. Panning, the camera reveals the first images were the reflection of a mirror; the following images get even more heartbreaking as she beseeches him to do something to help their romance alive, but he could only say that he cannot, he just cannot.
Even, to Edoardo’s surprise, the supposed political connections Antonio Magnano had in Rome look more a fantasy than a reality. Looking over and over into mirrors, feeling more and more desperate as he deals with a young wife who is expecting from him to play the part of a breeder, eventually deprived of his love and his independence, hiding in his bedroom in the apartment of parents who are aggrieved and humbled, Antonio Magnano charts a poignant course revealing the fake he is, not really in his own eyes but in the eyes of the society. His ordeal is not only to lose a woman he compares to an angel and admires but even more to become himself a scandal and a shame as what defines him runs contrary to what defines his world.
There is little hope in this tale of manliness in crisis. The helping hand extended in the final part to Antonio Magnano comes from a plain and shy maid, Santuzza, who gets pregnant and lets others, especially Antonio Magnano’s mother, Rosaria Magnano, who has just become a widow, think Antonio Magnano is the father. But it seems too good to be true and indeed the melancholy attitude and sullen mien of the young man suggest it is simply another lie that does not please him at all. The prospect of marrying her makes him even gloomier and more desperate: looking again at a mirror he is too aware of his essential flaw and feels trapped in a society that values far more semen than respect. This last image fades in the still image of a wall where the words “The End” appear: a prisoner unable to escape is what Antonio Magnano will remain.
Through the tragic fate of Antonio Magnano, depicted carefully and rigorously, subtly suggesting and then movingly revealing, with cruel comic touches, like the death of his father after paying a visit to a hustler or, in a more sarcastic and troubling way, the party for the deputy, the film dares to put on the center stage impotency and thus to question radically part of the Italian culture, assaulting a cult of the virility that is just an excuse for men to assert sexual and social domination without being challenged.
The boldest move of the film, written in part by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is to rely on a rising star who is viewed as an epitome of the so-called Latin seduction, an actor truly attractive and elegant proving to be popular and magnetic to play the difficult lead role, opposite to another rising star looking like an epitome of beauty and sensuality, a Claudia Cardinale many would be pleased to entertain and thus set to look like a perfect and moving victim of her husband’s failure. Released the same year as director Federico Fellini’s “La dolce vita”, “Bell’Antonio” gives actor Marcello Mastroianni another opportunity to show a more heartbreaking and troubling aspect of his skills, demonstrating admirably how he can tap a more tragic well of emotions and explore a more tortured side of personality. Twice in 1960 Mastroianni has thus revealed how great and complex he is but also how pathetic and paralyzing the very definition of a true man in the Italian culture is, a dead end deceptively posing as the only way forward.