Come Have Coffee with Us

Emerenziano, a fifty-year-old tax official, decides it is time to settle down and sets his sights on the three Tettamanzi sisters, who have recently come into a large inheritance. He marries the eldest and then begins living with all three. At first he is the one doing the calculating, but in time it reverses, and the man is worn out inside the arrangement the three women have built. He ends up paralysed by a stroke, in a wheelchair, still in their care. Alberto Lattuada's black comedy takes the moral vocabulary of the Italian provinces and turns it inside out: marriage here is not shelter but a way of eating. Ugo Tognazzi walks a man who thinks himself clever step by step into a trap the audience sees before he does. The source is Piero Chiara's novel. The comedy is so closely concerned with ageing and impotence that the laughter keeps landing somewhere uncomfortable.