The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie Review

Sex, lies, and double-standards.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater June 15, 2012

With a string of lauded films in the 1970s, the always controversial Lina Wertmüller took the commedia all'italiana in a distinctly anarcha- feminist direction. Furthering the cinematic social consciousness of post-war "pink neorealism" directors like Vittorio De Sica and Mario Monicelli, Wertmüller's satires from this period slice through the braided cord of patriarchy, class, and Italian politics. Of these, Swept Away and Seven Beauties have gained the most international attention—for the latter, Wertmüller secured the distinction of being the first ever female filmmaker nominated for a Best Director Oscar—but her three previous films are just as comedically incisive. Kino-Lorber has produced new Blu-ray editions of The Seduction of Mimi, Love & Anarchy, and All Screwed Up, each of which presents a different facet of Wertmüller's anti-status quo ideology.

Mimi and Fiore

First up is The Seduction of Mimi, a sex farce that skewers male attitudes about affairs and cuckoldry—that is, men love cheating but hate being cheated on—while giving a satirical overview of Italy's labor politics in the 1970s. This was Wertmüller's first film with frequent leading man Giancarlo Giannini, who plays Carmelo "Mimi" Mardocheo, a crazy-haired Sicilian sulfur miner who's wife, Rosalia (Agostina Belli), is so frigid in bed that she looks like "a lamb lead to slaughter." It doesn't help that they live in a typically Italian multi-generational household, with the distinct lack of privacy that that entails.

There are more than just sexual tensions at play. The local mafioso (Turi Ferro)—a powerful businessman with three moles on his face—has been intimidating workers to rig an election, but when Mimi crosses party lines and votes for the communists just to be contrarian, he finds himself out of a job. Mimi heads north to the mainland, looking for work—leaving behind his wife, who liberates herself in his absence—but everywhere he goes, the bosses have the same triangular constellation of moles on their cheeks. The implication? Power rests in the hands of the few; in this case, a single family of fascist, industry-monopolizing thugs who silence their opponents with bloodshed. Mimi himself doesn't seem to care much about the politics— he just wants to earn a living—but he falls in with the "red" unionists simply because they represent the only viable alternative.

He also falls for Fiore (Mariangela Melato), a Cosby-sweater-knitting progressive with gorgeous green eyes and a firm stance against marriage. She believes in freely given love, though, and at least a kind of temporary monogamy, warning Mimi, "if you so much as touch another woman, even your wife, it's goodbye." Before long they have a darling bastard baby boy, but Mimi once again falls afoul of the powers that be—he witnesses a mafia massacre—and is forced to return to Sicily with his secret family in tow. The central gag of the film is that Mimi is oblivious to the delicious irony when he comes home and discovers that his adulterous wife is carrying the child of a married army officer. Our hapless protagonist is outraged—doubly so because there's a rumor going around town that he's impotent and/or gay—and so he devises an elaborate scheme to seduce and impregnate the officer's own wife, Amalia (Elena Fiore), an obese seamstress who's already had five kids.

The very idea of this sort of screw-for-a-screw, child-for-a-child retribution is ridiculous, and Wertmüller uses it to highlight the equally risible notion that men somehow one-sidedly own their wives' bodies and minds. Mimi does convince Amalia to go through with the plan, and they have a comically awkward sexual liaison that Wertmüller films with an extremely wide-angled fisheye lens, making Amalia's already elephantine ass and breasts grotesquely fill the screen, turning her into the real-life equivalent of a paleolithic fertility doll. If the film has one searingly unforgettable image, it's this.

Mimi is a comically tragic character, and his flaw—though not fatal—is an all-around lack of moral conviction. He likes to think of himself as "civilized," but not only does he hold to an absurd double-standard regarding marital fidelity, he's also a political opportunist and flip-flopper who lets himself be goaded into supporting fascism and cultural traditionalism for the sake of his own safety and comfort. While Fiore may not be the most erudite comrade —she venerates Trotsky and Mao, two figures almost dialectically opposed within the overall schema of communism—she at least has an unflappable devotion to her cause. When Fiore hangs a picture of Lenin over their bed, Mimi begs her to take it down because he feels the marxist revolutionary is silently judging him. Of course, this is his own conscience speaking.

Like a lot of Italian comedies from the '60s and 70's, The Seduction of Mimi is both a broad farce—filled with stereotypical characters and borderline slapstick comedy—and a pointed satire, jabbing at the more absurd aspects of a society in flux. It works wonderfully on both levels. Wertmüller, who got her break as an assistant director on Fellini's 8½, shares her mentor's obsession with the mixing of high and low culture, and her sense of humor is cheekily sophisticated. It's also no coincidence that her best films all star Giancarlo Giannini. His character here is entirely dickish—that's simply the perfect word for it—but Giannini is so funny and woefully wrongheaded that we can't help but give Mimi our pity.

The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

At first glance and from a distance, Kino-Lorber's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfers of Mimi and the other two Lina Wertmüller titles look decent and about what you'd expect from mid-1970s Italian films—reasonably sharp and nicely colored, with only mild age-related print damage. If you peer closer, though, you'll often see—in addition to grain—what looks like a flurry of buzzing compression artifacts, sometimes obscuring fine textures, softening hard lines, and affecting the gradation between colors. I reached out to Kino, asking about what might've caused this, and I got this response: "The HD masters came from a different source than usual, Societe Nouvelle de Distribution, and were not transferred by Bret Wood, who normally oversees most of our Kino Classics titles." To me, these look like high definition masters that were originally intended for a DVD release—natural filmic grain seems somewhat diminished and softened, but the image is still quite noisy. If you have a smaller TV this might not be as apparent, but those with large screens or projectors will probably notice it. Still, this isn't a huge distraction—from a normal viewing distance it's never overtly apparent—and in terms of overall clarity these transfers present a solid improvement over older home video editions. Could these films look even better? Absolutely. Is it likely they'll actually get a restorative overhaul sometime within this technological generation? I kind of doubt it. I'm content.

The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Seduction of Mimi features an uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio mono track that's listenable and probably as good as the film is ever going to sound. There are some source and age-related issues, of course, but nothing particularly distracting. Like a lot of Italian films from the era, the dubbing is obvious and not always perfectly recorded, with plosives—p's, b's, k's, t's—sometimes coming out a bit crackly. The music can also be slightly brash in the high end, but the score by Piero Piccioni—who also did Swept Away and Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt—is otherwise clear and detailed, and suits the film well. The disc includes optional English subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.

The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra on the disc is a photo gallery with five grainy stills.

The Seduction of Mimi Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Seduction of Mimi is sometimes overlooked as a warm-up to Swept Away—a film that deals more forcefully with the overlap of politics and gender—but it's a very sharp satire in its own right, skewering certain patriarchal attitudes still present during Italy's cultural revolution. (And still around now, unfortunately.) The film's Blu-ray presentation isn't quite up to the high standards that we expect from Kino—this goes for all three of Kino's Wertmüller releases this month—but some slight compression noise/artifacting is no reason not to add Mimi to your collection if you're a fan of Italian cinema. Recommended!