The Seduction of Mimi

Mimì, a Sicilian labourer, loses his job for refusing to vote as instructed and goes to Turin. In the north he joins the union, moves in with a communist woman and takes himself for a modern man. Then he returns to Sicily, learns his wife is pregnant by another man, and finds that a question of honour has carried him thirty years backwards in an instant. Lina Wertmüller wrote it as satire on the mafia, on class and on masculinity at once, with Mimì's plan of revenge making a fool of him. Giancarlo Giannini leads and the directing prize at Cannes came with this film. Toward the end it stops being comedy and becomes entrapment. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political satire and the hard comedies of the seventies. Who it is not for: anyone uncomfortable with the humiliation of women used as comic material.