The Seduction Of Mimi
Giannini is Mimi, who at the beginning of the film works in a sulfur mine. Though told to vote for the mob-backed candidate, he votes for the communist, thinking it would be a secret ballot. He ends up getting fired and blackballed, and leaves his wife and family behind and goes to Turin. Through a series of misadventures, he earns the respect of a local mob chieftain and gets a good job as a metalworker.
He also meets a fellow traveler, Mariangela Melato, and after a rough courtship (he practically rapes her in the woods) they fall in love and she bears a child. But then he gets transferred back to Sicily, and has to hide his double life.
Like the other films I've viewed of Wertmuller's, this is not a feminist manifesto. It proves that just because a woman is making a film, it may not be sensitive to women's issues. The Seduction Of Mimi is misogynistic, sometimes cruelly so. I think the worst scene is when Giannini, whose wife got knocked up by a policeman, gets revenge by seducing that man's wife. She is played by Elena Fiore as a homely, vulgar woman, and Wertmuller takes inordinate interest in her body. She is naked, and her large posterior is viewed with a wide-angle lens, making her look twice as large as Giannini. He puts on faces of disgust. I felt bad for Fiore in this scene, and all women.
Giannini's performance is really the only good thing about this film, as it almost Chaplinesque. He is supposed to be the everyman who gets shit on by the everyone else (in one amusing detail, all the men who cause him grief have three moles on one cheek, and many are played by the same actor). Otherwise The Seduction Of Mimi relies too much on the exploitation of the unfortunate (another misogynistic character is Mimi's wife, who is frigid, but when she finds out that Giannini has a mistress she goes full crazy). Just unpleasant all around.
Comments
Post a Comment