OVP: Marriage Italian-Style (1964)

Film: Marriage-Italian Style (1964)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Vittorio de Sica
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Sophia Loren, Foreign Language Film-Italy...though they were in different years; this is one of roughly a dozen foreign language films to get their FF nomination in a different year than one of their other nominations, though this is the truly rare time where the FF nod came after the acting nomination, as it was usually the other way around)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm aware that we're now moving into our second film with Loren & Mastroianni (and our third where she's directed by Vittorio de Sica), which might feel a bit repetitive when it comes to Loren's career.  But while Loren was making movies of this era in the United States, most notably The Fall of the Roman Empire (for which she became the second-ever actress to receive a $1 million paycheck, after Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra), these weren't where she was getting the most creative juice.  Loren was oftentimes just asked to be unattainable & beautiful in American films, but it was in Italian cinema like Two Women and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow that she was getting critical hosannas & working on movies that would be more lasting to her legacy (and thus more interesting in a retrospective of her work).  Marriage-Italian Style was also important to Loren's career because it was her second (and to-date, last) Oscar nomination, so missing it feels a bit of a miss considering we're only going to be profiling two Oscar-nominated actresses this entire season.  With that caveat, let's move into Marriage-Italian Style

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the complicated romance between Domenico (Mastroianni), a cruel, successful businessman who has a penchant for prostitutes, and a prostitute he becomes infatuated with named Filumena (Loren).  The two start a decades long affair, with her eventually taking on more traditional roles similar to a wife, such as caring for his dying mother & helping run his shops, but never actually becoming his wife-he uses her, she puts up with it because she's in love with him & doesn't feel she can do better.  When he decides to actually marry a younger girl who works in his shop, Filumena fakes her own deathbed to convince him to marry her, and it works-she marries him, and in the best scene of the movie, reveals her plan to him (while contemptuously eating a plate of pasta).  As he tries to annul the marriage, she reveals another secret to him-she has three sons (proving that he's been away from her for extended periods of his life), only one of which is his, and she wants nothing in terms of money, but wants her sons to have his name, so that she can be acknowledged as their mother.

The film is weird, because in the first half, it's lensed as kind of a comic play, climaxing in the reveal of the deathbed hoax.  It also doesn't really work-Domenico is too much of an asshole for us to really care or even ever forgive him for what he did to Filumena, and part of me was hoping that he wouldn't so easily wriggle out of the marriage (even though eventually he'd get married to Filumena for real).  The tone of the film is also weird because the first seven minutes are told before a flashback, and are so somber you also would be confused about the tone of the film.  This makes this film feel sloppy in a way that neither of our two other entries with de Sica & Loren did, and makes this my least favorite of the three.

The movie works better as a drama, where Filumena & Domenico have to acknowledge their age and the failed nature of their relationship in order to find some sort of solace with their children.  This doesn't necessarily make for better acting (I feel like Loren is too reliant on madonna/whore tropes in this role, and doesn't have the nuance of Yesterday or the dramatic heft of Two Women, though she's still eminently watchable & nails that reveal scene so beautifully you'd be forgiven for not remembering anything else), but it makes for a more grounded, straight-forward script, which is what Marriage Italian-Style is in need of in order to figure out its purpose.

Next week, we're going to go later into Loren's career and talk about what happened after she moved beyond her peak fame in the 1960's, to a film made after de Sica's death, with the concluding review devoted to our August star.