Bel Antonio
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Bel Antonio |
| Original title | Il bell'Antonio |
| Country of production | Italy |
| original language | Italian |
| Publishing year | 1960 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Mauro Bolognini |
| script |
Pier Paolo Pasolini Gino Visentini |
| production | Raphael Hakim |
| music | Piero Piccioni |
| camera | Armando Nannuzzi |
| cut | Nino Baragli |
| occupation | |
| |
Bel Antonio (Original title: Il bell'Antonio ) is a feature film with Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale . It was staged by Mauro Bolognini in 1960 . Pier Paolo Pasolini co- wrote the script ; it was based on the novel by Vitaliano Brancati , which took place in the fascist era and whose plot has been transferred to the contemporary present.
action
After a few years in Rome, the handsome Antonio returns to his parents in Catania , Sicily . The reputation of having had an enormous number of women from the capital follows him; they “yelped like cats at his door”. His wealthy parents want to marry him to the still unknown Barbara, which he initially rejects. When he sees her photo, he falls in love and declares that he is ready to marry before he has even met her.
The pompous wedding of the two beautiful young people is a city event. Antonio moves with Barbara to a spacious orange grove that his father has given him. After three months, Barbara has the maid explain to Barbara how to actually make children. A year after the marriage, Barbara's father visits Antonio's father and complains that Barbara is still untouched. Her family obtained the archbishop's approval for the marriage to be annulled because it was not consummated. Because Barbara immediately marries a very wealthy duke, Antonio's family suspects that their family is after his money. Antonio confides to his cousin that he was eager to visit whores in Rome, but when he fell seriously in love with a girl, he could not bear physical love. The same thing happened to him with Barbara, whom he still loves. His parents' maid turns out to be pregnant - thanks, as the parents assume, Antonio, which they proudly call out into town to save the family honor. Antonio remains sad: he is prevented from loving his great love Barbara according to his own style.
Reviews in 1965
The film service had a lot of praise for the novel, which addresses the “excessive feeling of honor in Sicily, which has been preserved from pre-Christian times to this day”. But even Pasolini's scenario went "one step below the level of the novel, in that the dialogue took on exaggerated features of modern peasant theater." Bolognini acts a further step lower, who occasionally slips into embarrassing and ridiculousness. It is true that the character of Antonio “still has an effect thanks to Mastroianni's excellent empathy,” and Cardinale shows a great talent. The film of the “optically playful” Bolognini could “- especially due to the appealing camera performance - pass as a directing talent test in all too different styles and will certainly dazzle some film fans.” But the form of the “comic tragedy” leaves unsatisfied, the narrative convey neither the psychological and spiritual connections nor the motivations of the protagonists. "The plot of the film emphasizes the comic-grotesque of reality too strongly towards the banal fatality and effective colportage and therefore no longer meets the overlaid melancholy seriousness and the natural irony of Brancati's original."
The film critics judged that this was not a flawless film: “The hero of all his films is the man who can only distinguish women according to mothers, saints and whores (...) Bolognigi's failure, probably due to his lack of distance from his own self, is it is, however, basically never to see one's hero as having become, but rather - to use this precarious word here consciously - as thrown. (...) The social landscape and the historical moment do not count for Bolognini (...) Everything is only visual evidence of the hero's mental state, never part of a verifiable reality. ” Bel Antonio is an exception to this because Bolognini is for once at least he knows how to fill the pictures with meaning, even if he still doesn’t forego a beautifully designed picture in a single shot. The quality of the work lies in its attack on a "whole totalitarian male society".
Web links
- Bell'Antonio in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The film at comingsoon.it