1972 ‘Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore’ Directed by Lina Wertmüller
Voting against the Mafia in what he thinks is a secret ballot costs Sicilian laborer Mimi his livelihood. He leaves his wife, flees to Turin and romances a Communist organizer - but he just can’t shake the Mafia. When they lure Mimi back to Sicily with a better job, he must keep his lover – and love child – under wraps. That’s when his wife announces she’s pregnant.
Mimi, métallo blessé dans son orgueil, Мими-металлург, уязвлённый в своём достоинстве, Мими-металлист, уязвленный в своей чести, Mimi, in seiner Ehre gekränkt, Die Versuchungen des Mimi, Mimi, der in seiner Ehre gekränkte Metallarbeiter, Μίμης ο Σιδεράς, Mimí metalúrgico, herido en su honor, Mimi, metallo blessé dans son honneur, פיתויו של מימי, მიმის ცდუნება, 미미의 유혹, Mimi, O Metalúrgico, Мими-металлург, уязвленный в своем достоинстве, 咪咪的诱惑
"Buying a pair of underpants is political, you're making a choice" -Mimi,
- Film Club Ranked: boxd.it/3M2sq
It only kind of seduced me.
Everything is political I agree but it doesn't mean that I always understand the context for the politics. While some of the general fear of corrosive power that is displayed in this film is universal I couldn't help but feeling like I was missing the context for some of the commentary in this film. It's because I'm an ugly American who knows so little about certain aspects of history. This made some of the political discussions more boring for me where I normally like that stuff. The rest of the film is fine but not really exceptional in any way. The performances are good, the film does look great but the overall progression of the story can be slow and then slower.
Not really a fan.
Lina Wertmüller's The Seduction of Mimi feels like a dry run for her great Seven Beauties, being her first critical exploration of the spinelessness of an egoist played by Giancarlo Giannini. Here, the stakes are much smaller than in the later film, and thus Mimi's eager, repeated betrayals of himself and those who care about him are less important, something which both makes it easier to mock and dismiss Mimi, and renders the film significantly less impactful than its weighty spiritual companion.
While Wertmüller might not have quite the disdain for Mimi that she does for Seven Beauties' Pasqualino, he's an equally pathetic character, a man convinced of his own importance who dissolves into cowardice and compromise at the first…
My second Wertmüller, Love and Anarchy is a masterpiece and this is also great (if a bit more uneven). It's funny and fierce and features some of the best knitwear in the history of cinema.
A blue-collar worker votes left-wing and loses his job, so he leaves his wife and moves to a new town where he gets work through the mafia. He takes a mistress and they have a child, but then he's forced to return to his hometown, where he must hide his mistress from his wife. He feigns impotence, so his lonely wife also takes a lover—unacceptable! So the hypocrite makes love to wife's lover's wife, cuckolding the man who cuckolded him in a farcical web of revenge-sex.
The main theme here seems to be class treachery, which the film aligns with and frames as a kind of socio-economic cuckoldry. The solemnity of organized crime is made into a satirical caricature, reduced…
Hey, girl are you a comrade?
Because we should share the means of reproduction!
A film about a pervert in the communist party who harrasses one woman after the next. It manages to be light-hearted and funny despite dealing with serious subjects like assault and domestic violence. If/when there's a revolution, I hope the vanguard isn't full of creeps like Mimi. At its core it feels like a very Italian film - fierce, expressive, energetic and there's gangsters of course.
WR: Mysteries of the Organism is still in the lead for best leftwing film screened at Filmsoc though!
Wertmüller's ability to make the viewer feel the complexity of the world through the absurd is on another level. While her films seem to be very specifically related to the milieu of an era in a certain country, they are also quite universal tales about human weakness that reveals itself in impossible network of other people, culture and society. Mimi is never really the victim of circumstances like English or Finnish titles ("Victims of Mafia") seem to suggest but someone who is constantly struggling to keep on to his ideals that fall off one by one as he abandons them in order to widen the moral space to reach for his personal benefit. "Seduction" seems to be fine title in…
L. Wertmüller #3 --- Giancarlo Giannini is so funny in this. The characters he plays in Wertmüller's movies are so different from the ones he usually plays. It's a blast seeing him act like a complete idiot or a macho, depending on the scene. The movie basically deals with honor, family, the differences between the North and South of Italy, the working-class and their needs, the left, the mafia, and love. All of it comes together in an utterly hilarious comedy set in both Sicily and Torino. Most of the comedy isn't subtle, I'd say it's almost over the top. It's hard to say what's so funny about it without giving anything away. So I'm just gonna leave it at that and tell you to check this movie out for yourself.
Lina Wertmüller (ranked)
"Buying a pair of underpants is politics."
The Seduction of Mimi is not a poliziotteschi, not even close, but it touches intimately on the issues at the heart of the genre. Like many of Lina Wertmüller's movies, it captures the pessimism of the Years of Lead. Wertmüller often accomplished this in a way that few other filmmakers could; she delivered that feeling that everyone is bad, even the good guys — especially the good guys — and here, in The Seduction of Mimi that pessimism is wielded in the arena of political and moral corruption and the effect of each upon the other.
The story opens directly into the realm of the manipulation of democracy: a…
