Il merlo maschio
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| Il Merlo Maschio | |
|---|---|
| Image:Il Merlo Maschio Laura Antonellli 1971.jpg original film poster |
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| Directed by | Pasquale Festa Campanile |
| Produced by | [[]] |
| Written by | Luciano Bianciardi (from the book Il complesso di Loth) |
| Starring |
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| Music by | [[]] |
| Editing by | Mario Morra, Sergio Montanari |
| Release date(s) | 1971 |
| Running time | 112 min. |
| Language | Italian, English |
Il merlo maschio (The Male Blackbird) is an italian motion picture, filmed in 1971 by director Pasquale Festa Campanile.
[edit] Story
The husband Niccolò Vivaldi, is a frustrated viola player (Lando Buzzanca), with a static career, and not receiving any praise form his orchestra director, begis to take photographs of his beloved wike in poses that slowly became pornographics. Soon after this He begins to show the images to his friend and collegue Cavalmoretti (Lino Toffolo) and in a secondo moment to all the other members of the orchestra, in an exhibitionistic crescendo that will led him to expose her wife (by an apparent incident with her dress) before all the public of Verona's Arena, during the showing of Aida.
In this way He shouted out his frustration, and arrived to be envyed, when He managed to expose her most admirable and unreachable good (nobody could stole him her wife, because in Italy there was'nt divorce). And the young, beautyful and dumb wife (Laura Antonelli, a perplexed but pleasant woman from the countryside) that accepts to be carried inside a violoncello's case, in order to be shown over a bridge in Verona (an idea that seems a marvellous quoting of reknown photograph by the dadaist artist Man Ray).
[edit] Comment
This motion picture was filmed in Verona, and it shows many situations in the enviroment of practing symphonic orchestras that at certain moment of the year are allowed to play in Arena. Il Merlo Maschio is maybe one of the most beutiful and "lighter" films that better reppresent the Commedia all'italiana.
This film is really different from the big mass of italian commedy films in that epoch, always repeating the storyboards of the first erotic dreams of the symbolic teenager Pierino, or the arousal reactions of secluded soldiers that watch for the first time the shapes of a beauty queen (Gloria Guida, ecc.). The Male Blackbird is also a light and discrete sociologic presentation of the theme of candaulism, something very frequent today (husbands that buy transparent panties and bras to her wifes) but that was very rare at those times: the apparently casual, but carefully planed exposing of the spouse by his husband (Candaulism is classified by psychiatrist as a mania o paraphilia).
