Divorce Italian Style

A Sicilian aristocrat is sick of his wife, and divorce is not legal. He finds a clause: a husband who catches his wife with another man receives only a light sentence for killing her in a rage. So he sets about making her fall for someone else. The film turns honour killing into comic material, but its target is not husbands, it is the law that makes this possible. The narrative uses his interior voice to make the viewer complicit in the plan, which is where the discomfort comes from. Pietro Germi directed, with Marcello Mastroianni in the lead. It won the Academy Award for its screenplay. Before watching: the law in the film was real and was not repealed in Italy until 1981. Without knowing that, the comedy looks like exaggeration; it was the fact of the period.