Summary
When Agnese, the youngest daughter of a Sicilian family, falls for her older sister’s fiance’, Peppino, she ends up pregnant a with a family desperate to see justice served and their daughter married, whether anyone involved actually wants that or not.
Review
I have commented before about how seldom I like modern American comedies. It has sort of turned me off of comedies altogether for a while. When I want a laugh I typically turn on a bad movie but some friends of mine whose opinions I trust swore up and down by this film so I was pretty excited to find out if it lived up to the hilarity hype.
I will say that the film is a little long, but that is not a problem. It’s a feature. Most comedies can’t maintain their spirit for more than 90 minutes but this one, coming in at closer to two hours, uses that extra half hour to flesh out such a wide variety of characters that the levels of humor at play end up unfolding, layer after layer, with accompanying humor as people’s inconsistency, hypocrisy, immorality, and stridency are revealed for what they really are. The excuses of silly, selfish, and vain people.
The best comedies, this film included, do more than simply crack jokes. They highlight the worst qualities of humanity for the ridiculous things they are and reveal the hidden idiosyncrasies in our assumptions.
The situation presented in the film is the a thing of overwrought dramatic soap operas and reality TV. A 15 year old girl falls for her older sister’s finance and gets pregnant. What is unique about the humor in this film is the rest of the family’s reactions. The father, Don Vincenzo is incensed, of course and demands that Peppino marry Aganese. To do this however, Vincenzo must chase him down and convince him to marry her and Peppino just doesn't want to marry a girl who might not be faithful since she has already demonstrated that she is susceptible to seduction, even if he was the seducer.
Convincing him might be easier if it wasn’t for he fact that Don Vincenzo, while caring very much whether or not his daughter is wed, cares even more that all of this remain on the hush hush. He simply will not have the family name be dragged through the dirt, even if he has to lie, cheat, steal, or murder, to keep people from thinking the family is a bunch of degenerates.
This tug of war between people’s conflicting desires is what makes this film so delightfully funny. I have no doubt that this film will join films like “Tampopo” and “Death of Stalin” in my regular rotation of films I enjoy showing people when we are all in the mood for a laugh.
That isn’t to say that the film isn’t expertly crafted. The cinematography is excellent and the editing is actually used to great effect in telling its own jokes to the audience but the real pleasure, for me, was in the characters being so real in their motivations, simply extreme in their actions.
A film may have many faults that I will forgive for the sake of great characters but luckily, this film has no faults to forgive save that too few people will see it simply because they don’t like subtitles and that is not the films fault at all.
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