So after a bottle of wine and an episode of Enterprise, I’m looking for a movie to watch that’s maybe less trashy, but still chill and easygoing; Criterion Channel describes this Italian movie by Lina Wertmüller as a “sex comedy,” and hey, let’s have some stylish midcentury Italians romping around, that sounds light enough.

Well. So the movie starts off with the titular dude voting for a communist (and therefore against the local Mafia candidate) in a Sicilian election, and then getting hounded out of his job. He leaves town (and his wife, who he doesn’t really like) to go to Turin to get another job outside of the Mafia’s influences; it doesn’t quite work, but he actually gets on the Mafia’s good side after not telling on them after a murder, and gets a job in a Fiat plant, doing steelworking.

And then we get into the alleged “sex comedy” part, where he sees a woman on the street selling leftist propaganda (and ugly sweaters), and tries to woo her. And she turns out to be not only a hardcore leftist (a Trotskyite, even) but also weirdly traditional in a non-traditional way — she doesn’t believe in marriage, doesn’t care that he’s already married, but if she’s going to boink him, demands that he be totally monogamous to her, including with his wife. Which, uh, okay, that’s an ethos.

So that goes on for a while, and he has a kid with this lady (which is treated just utterly matter-of-factly, neither a source of joy nor worry), and then some more mob-related stuff goes down, and he ends up going back to Sicily, where of course he has to live with his wife. She doesn’t know that he has a whole second family, so that’s fun. He turns her down when she wants sex, and continues his affair with his mistress/babymama.

And then his wife gets pregnant from some other guy. His friends take him aside to tell him this, leading into the news with the “look, everyone knows what you’re doing,” which gets him all like “man, who even cares, it doesn’t matter,” and then they break the news about his own wife, and Mimi goes on a violent rampage, because double standards are the best standards; but then instead of killing anyone, he concocts an elaborate form of revenge, which is: he’ll seduce and impregnate the wife of the guy who got his wife pregnant, haha take that.

So he goes to do this, and the wife has zero interest in him, but he is persistent, and finally he just straight up tells her that he wants revenge, and she’s all pissed off that her husband cheated on her, so she goes along with it, and they successfully get her pregnant. Which, btw, deliberately getting pregnant with a guy you don’t even like is one hell of a commitment to revenge.

They then confront the newly-pregnant lady’s husband, who is a cop, in public with the evidence that his wife cheated on him and is pregnant; he tries to shoot them, but she had anticipated that and taken the bullets out of his gun. BUT a Mafia guy nearby sees the guy about to shoot, and shoots him, and he is dead. The Mafia guy dumps the gun into Mimi’s hand, and Mimi goes to jail; because he once again didn’t tattle on the Mafia, they reward him when he’s out with a Mafia job.

And so the last scene is Mimi driving along, handing out propaganda for the Mafia’s political candidate, and he comes up to his former mistress and his child, and she’s appalled that he’s now betrayed his communist ideals, so she leaves, and he chases after her crying, and then collapses in on himself, sobbing, as the credits roll.

HAHA, WHAT A HILARIOUS ROMP!

What’s really interesting about it, though, is that if you’re not familiar with the politics of Italy in that time period, it ends up feeling very science fictional. Like, what does it mean to be Sicilian in Italy? There’s a lot of people saying “Southerners” in a derisive way, but what are all the connotations of being “Southern” there and then? And what’s the significance of Turin to Sicilians? What attaches to Communist belief — was it a popular party, an extremist revolutionary violence thing, both? And how much of the courting/seduction-type behavior in this is normal for the time, how much is Mimi being Sicilian, how much is dramatic exaggeration, etc?

So but yeah, if you’re looking to watch a political sex tragedy, here’s one for you; but if you just want something light to watch, uh, maybe just keep moving.