The Queen Bee (1963)

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Movie
German title The queen bee
Original title Una storia moderna - l'ape regina
Country of production Italy , France
original language Italian
Publishing year 1963
length 90 min (Italy), 100 (France) minutes
Rod
Director Marco Ferreri
script Marco Ferreri,
Rafael Azcona ,
Diego Fabbri ,
Massimo Franciosa ,
Pasquale Festa Campanile
production Enrico Chroscicki ,
Alfonso Sansone
music Teo Usuelli
camera Ennio Guarnieri
cut Lionello Massobrio
occupation

The Queen Bee (original title: Una storia moderna - l'ape regina ) is an Italian film satire by Marco Ferreri from 1963. After three feature films in Spain, Ferreri made a feature film for the first time in his home country. It is about a middle-aged man who is completely exhausted by his younger, child-wishing wife. He and his co-author Rafael Azcona got the idea for this story from the one-act act La moglie a cavallo by Goffredo Parise . In addition to its realism-bound portrayal of contemporary Italian life, and especially of men, the film narration has macabre features. Ferreri aimed at a matriarchal , monstrous femininity for which a man has no value after the reproductive act has been completed - the title draws a biological parallel to bees, where the male drone does not live on after the queen bee has been fertilized . The director, according to which the female instinct of possession always destroys a man, saw in it a product of Catholic teaching and family morality. The reduction of marriage to the function of multiplication robs it of any human dimension. Initially started under the title L'ape regina , the satire was withdrawn from circulation by the censors because of "obscenity", shortened, recut, provided with an introductory text and only approved six months later with the title addition Una storia moderna . It was Ferreri's first film to gain notoriety beyond a narrow cinematic audience - it was the fifth most-viewed local production with revenues of 335 million lire - but also earned it a reputation for being misogynist . The work was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963 , where the jury selected Marina Vlady as the best actress. The queen bee also marks the beginning of Ferreri's long-term collaboration and friendship with Ugo Tognazzi , who received the Nastro d'Argento in 1964 for best male leading role.

action

A text panel drawn by Marco Ferreri heralds a "bitter" marriage story in which a bigoted understanding of the "firm and immovable principles of morality and religion" causes misfortune. Alfonso, a man around forty, is a partner in a prosperous Citroën agency in Rome with his friend Riccardo . They often meet young women in the evenings. But now the bachelor wants to enter the port of marriage. His old school friend, Father Mariano, found him the much younger Regina, from a family firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition, who lives with her mother and two widowed aunts. During the engagement, the religiously educated rejects sexual advances and enters the marriage virgin.

Alfonso moves into the house of Regina's family, a stone's throw from the Vatican . After the marriage, Regina shows a strong erotic desire and desperately wants a child, but Alfonso turns out to be overwhelmed by her sexual demands. He turns to Father Mariano, to whom she listens so that the priest will convince Regina to moderate himself. But the clergyman reminds him, referring to Alfonso de Liguori , of the sacred conjugal duties and prescribes that the doctor give him hormone injections to strengthen him. When Alfonso sought refuge in the office one evening under the pretext of work, she surprisingly visited him there and lolled seductively on the sofa. During the day Alfonso runs into friends who are just leaving to spend a few days in a Catholic seminary without wives. He joins them. After less than a week the angry Regina picks him up. On the drive home, she accuses him of being old. He stops in a grove and sleeps with her. Regina becomes pregnant, which he regards as a miracle. She calls in a representative with whom Alfonso has to take out life insurance. Now she puts the child above everything and is increasingly cool with her husband. After his mother's death, they descend into the crypt in which she is buried, in which numerous members of her family are buried. In the face of so many signs of death, Alfonso becomes faint. He is relaxing on a country estate by plucking the chicken while the heavily pregnant Regina takes over his office work in the garage. After spending the night together, he has a heart attack. Back at home, he spends his last days in bed. Regina has him moved to a secluded room to create a nursery. When his son is born and baptized, Alfonso is already underground.

Contemporary reviews

Brigitte Jeremias reported from Cannes in 1963 for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . For them, The Queen Bee was stylistically similar to divorce in Italian . It deals with “a problem of the Romanesque south”, where after marriage celibate girls “pounce on their husbands like starved lionesses.” The attitude of such girls destroys marriage, which “has meanwhile been recognized by the modern forces of the Church as unchristian and absurd has been. "The film has wit, irony and original humor and appears" overwhelmingly funny due to its absurdity. Vlady played almost as well as the "excellent" Tognazzi.

Both left-wing film critics and the Catholic film service were of the opinion that Ferreri's film did not come close to divorce in Italian , but for different reasons. In the former, Ulrich Gregor only appreciated the beginning of the film with the drawing of Alfonso's personality and his inclusion in Regina's family. But compared to his previous films, Ferreri has become tamer. In addition to the “macabre comedy” and “grotesque eeriness”, he does not disdain “cheap humor”. The main part of the film is unoriginal and clumsy, an individual, private narrative that fails to shed light on social conditions. "Even the purely biological interpretation suggested by the film's title is questionable because it leaves no room for historical or social determination, but works with 'natural laws' as an analogy." That Alfonso goes under is arbitrarily constructed, what "the film for long stretches the interest ”. Ulrich Gregor pointed out that the original version shown in Cannes had scenes "which highlighted the complicity of the Catholic Church in maintaining a tyrannical family order", and which "may have fallen victim to the Wiesbaden FSK scissors ".

The film-dienst rejected Ferreri's film: "A scandal for Italy, a challenge for Catholic sentiments, a comical delight for liberalism." By subordinating sexuality entirely to the "law of fertility as a divine mandate and civil order", he said the film a "distorting view". "As intended, the typical Italian atmosphere of rigorous morality, in which natural sensuality can easily be exaggerated to ironic any valid value measure, makes things more difficult." everything catholic in general. ”One recognizes only too clearly“ known feelings of hatred against family, mother right and church ”. Marina Vlady admitted the film service to "make both the vital seductive power as well as later the coolness of a Mona Lisa believable".

Later assessments

According to the Ferreri monograph Maheo (1986), The Queen of Bees achieved the level of a good Dino Risi film, namely In Love with Sharp Curves ( Il sorpasso ) from 1962. Ferreri still adheres to cinematic conventions that he will only break in later works .

literature

  • Bruno Venturi: Una storia moderna - l'ape regina . In: Fernaldo Di Giammatteo (ed.): Dizionario del cinema italiano . Editori Reuniti, Rome 1995, ISBN 88-359-4008-7 , pp. 336-337. (Italian)
  • Michel Maheo: Marco Ferreri . Edilig, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-85601-131-4 , pp. 23-26. (French)
  • Jean A. Gili: Le cinéma Italy. Classiques, chefs-d'oeuvre et découvertes. La Martinière, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-7324-2093-X , pp. 263-265. (French)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roberto Poppi, Mario Pecorari: Dizionario del cinema italiano: I film. Volume III (A – L): Tutti i film italiani dal 1960 al 1969 . Gremese Editore, Rome 2007, ISBN 978-88-8440-478-7 , p. 53.
  2. ↑ Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones: A new guide to Italian cinema . Palgrave, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4039-7560-7 , p. 176.
  3. ^ Brigitte Jeremias: Parade of the western film countries. Report from the Cannes Festival . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 13, 1963, p. 20.
  4. ^ Ulrich Gregor: The queen bee . In: Filmkritik , No. 4/1964, pp. 191–193.
  5. ↑ film-dienst , No. 9/1964, not drawn
  6. ↑ Michel Maheo: Marco Ferreri . Edilig, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-85601-131-4 , p. 25.