He did not betray his friends.
Written: Oct 30 '09 (Updated Oct 30 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Intelligently humorous script, flawless and subtle acting, top-notch neo-realist cinematography.
Cons: Uncompromisingly grim statement about the Italian South, culture,and Man's capabilities..
The Bottom Line: Mafioso is simultaneously comedy and serious reflection, The Godfather's godfather and the gangster movie to end gangster movies. Excellently directed, with spot-on acting and cinematography, it was among 2007's best.
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| bkalafut's Full Review: Mafioso |
Mafioso is many things: ethnologue, comedy of manners, psychological drama, lingering comment on the human condition. Not so much a mob movie as an indictment of the "mafioso" and his culture, Alberto Lattuada's 1962 film, restored, rereleased, and just about rediscovered by Rialto Pictures, felt like the freshest film of 2007.
Protagonist Nino Baladimenti (Alberto Sordi) is a supervisor and time-and-motion man in the Milan Fiat plant, calm and precise almost to a fault, even admonishing a worker for going too fast. The proud "modern Sicilian", soon to bring his fashionable Northern wife Marta (Norma Bengell) and their two daughters to his native village, Calamo, is given a package to deliver to local Mafia chieftan Don Vincenzo by his security-obsessed boss Dr. Zanchi (Armando Tine), whose family hails from the same area by way of the USA ("Trenton. Trento? No, Trenton. New Jersey.") .
Marta struggles to conceal her apprehension about the trip, stating on the ferry that she feels like she's leaving Italy behind. Neither being stared by the folk along the road to Calamo, nor an encounter with a funeral for a man who "betrayed his friends", the highest sin in the land, do anything to convince her of the "hospitality" Nino attributes to his homeland.
Nino, on the other hand, is boiling over with excitement, lapsing into his native accent and nearly chattering about citrus trees and rustic life on the "island of sun and the Cyclops". By (mid-day) dinnertime, after introducing his wife to the toothless, nearly-indistinguishable black-clad women and mumbling old men who make up his family, he's bursting into song.
Marta and the Badalamenti clan rub each other the wrong way from the start. None of the gifts she brings, such as gloves for Nino's father, who, unbeknownst to her, lost a hand in a rather silly juvenile episode, are of any value to their recipients. Nino is being welcomed like the Prodigal Son and by extension Marta and the girls are honored guests; the couple is asked to sleep in the silver bed (located in a somewhat high traffic area of the house), the dining table is brought to the roof with ropes and tackle, and a multi-course feast is prepared. The manners are so foreign that the gestures are all lost on Marta, who is embarrassed by the bed, whose reserved manner insults Nino's parents, and who scandalizes the family by lighting up a cigarette at the dinner table after the first course, having thought the meal over!
The second third of the film is a series of episodes played for comic value. We see Nino's father and another toothless septuagenarians wrestle and knife-fight over a property deal complicated by a dowsing monk, several encounters between Nino and his boyish, single, largely unemployed childhood pals, and most significantly, a meeting between Nino and Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio). That Vincenzo, living on and supposedly managing an old noble estate, is an unsavory charater is obvious to everyone but Nino, who seems oblivious to the real nature of his business. In his youth, Nino was an errand-boy for Vincenzo, who may in turn have helped him leave Sicily for studies.
Marta, meanwhile, spends considerable time with Nino's mustachioed sister Rosalia (Gabriella Conti), inititally the only sympathetic person, sharing beauty tips and helping to build her self-confidence. Hostility of everyone else, coupled with boredom, has her visibly climbing the walls; Nino is oblivious enough to propose extending their stay to allow a hunting trip with old friends.
By the end of the scheduled stay, however, everything seems to turn out right. Rosalia's moustache is gone, Nino's mother is happy, and Don Vincenzo brokered a deal allowing Nino's father finally to become a landowner.
A twenty-minue, almost surreal whirlwind of events, just about tripling the film's emotional range, ensues. Here overlooked things--Zanchi's gift, bits of dialog, hints of the past--all come together, with a change of tone as abrupt as Nino's changed perception of his homeland. Casually--the viewer thinks little of it at the time--Nino demonstrated a skill of immediate use to Don Vincenzo; now Nino's father has placed his family in Vincenzo's debt and Nino is asked to make good on a boyhood oath to repay it. From Calamo Nino is taken to New York City to perform a favor the proud modern Sicilian of the Fiat plant would have thought a thing of the past. Just as soon as he's left, he's back, rabbit in hand as though from his hunting trip.
What a rejection of the rest of the film, and what clever structure! Sicily is not just Milan with a moustache, and we should have known that all along, not from what is said so much as from what is not said, ellipsis, silence, and omnipresent veiled threat. Like John Ford in The Searchers, Lattuada here gets from his actors, especially Attanasio as Don Vincenzo and Sordi as the naïve Nino, but also from the supporting cast and one-scene bit players, performances fit for silent film and parsimonious dialogue. Mafioso's neorealist style, then passé, brings humanity to the farcical scenes--the comedy all works, even in the context of the full film, and the full film, final sequence and all, works as comedy!--and anchors the shift in tone in time, place, and culture.
To Lattuada, it is culture that dominates, easily putting even the Fiat engineer and master of his own domain in over his head. And we see in no uncertain terms what Lattuada thinks not only of that culture but also of those who treat it with affection or sentimentaltiy. After The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos, the rerelease of Mafioso to American audiences is timely or overdue. It's beautifully executed, brilliantly honest, and so unique in conception that over forty years after its making, there's still nothing else like it. Releasing this isn't just another good move for Rialto Pictures, it's one of their best to date.
Mafioso's appears to still be available from Rialto for screenings, but its wide art-house release has ended, and it is now available as a Criterion Collection DVD.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: None of the Above
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Epinions.com ID:
bkalafut
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Member: Bennett Kalafut
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 259
Trusted by: 43 members
About Me:
Stretching single molecules for fun and profit.
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