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Saturday, Apr 15, 2000
Divorce, Italian Style
Ferdinando Cefalú is a model member of Sicily's good-for-nothing aristocracy: lazy and impossibly vain, he seems to spend most of his time skulking around his ancestors' decrepit villa in pajamas, eyebrows smugly arched, mouth pulled into a perpetual pout under a fussy mustache. ("I really am an intriguing type," he muses before the mirror.) Only an actor of Mastroianni's talents could make such a character simultaneously so reprehensible and so absurdly, irresistibly funny. Cefalú's problem: he's disgusted with his wife's overbearing affections and smitten by a nymphet cousin. Divorce in Sicily is unthinkable, but the law is lenient in matters of honor; if Mrs. Cefalú were to take a lover, who could blame her husband for murder? This gleefully nasty farce skewers every stratum of Sicilian society: busybody matrons, plodding Mafiosi, self-serving clergymen who denounce La Dolce Vita as "lascivious art," and all the upstanding citizens who sprint straight from church to the movie theater.-Juliet Clark
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