Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Divorce Italian Style
1961 · Pietro Germi · Divorce Italian Style on Sightlines
He is imagining his wife sinking into quicksand. She goes under. Then Germi cuts back to Fefè's face, lidded and motionless under its cigarette holder, the cheek giving its small involuntary twitch, the drawl resuming on the soundtrack as if nothing had happened.
That twitch is the whole argument of the film. It takes Deleuze several concepts to say what Mastroianni says with one muscle, but the concepts are worth having, because they show you what Germi actually built here — and it is not what the Italian cinema of 1961 was supposed to be building.
Around Germi, the celebrated films were breaking the link between seeing and doing. People look at things and can nothing about them; the plot stops advancing and time starts showing. Deleuze called that collapse the crisis of the action-image, and out of it came the time-image. Germi went the other way. His circuit works. Fefè perceives a situation — a wife he doesn't want, a cousin he does, a law with no exit — and acts to change it, methodically, and the action succeeds. This is a movement-image film made at the exact moment the movement-image was supposed to be exhausted, and the joke is structural. The machine still runs beautifully. That is what's obscene about it.
More precisely, it runs in the large form: a whole situation bears down on a man until one decisive act transforms it. Deleuze calls the pressing situation the encompasser, the milieu that surrounds a character and calls the act out of him. Germi films the encompasser as literal surveillance. The piazza, the church, the funeral, the rally, the deep-focus crowds of watchful faces; above all the Cefalù palazzo with the whole extended family crammed into its peeling rooms. The claustrophobia that motivates the murder is produced by the same architecture that will later sit in judgment on it. In the Western or the epic, the encompasser is nature or history, and the hero's act redeems it. Here the encompasser is a legal code. Divorce is illegal. Killing an unfaithful wife costs a few years. The situation doesn't call for heroism; it publishes a procedure.
The concept that really unlocks the film is Deleuze's third great type, the relation-image, or mental-image. Its exemplar is Hitchcock, and its principle is that the meaning of a scene lives in a relation the audience holds rather than in anything a character does: we are made the knowing third party, and our knowledge is the film's real material. Germi gets there through the voiceover. Fefè's narration is silken, retrospective, endlessly self-exculpating, and it hands us the plan before he executes it. We are not watching to learn what happens. We hold what the townspeople don't, and that possession is precisely what makes us laugh. The suspense of this film is our own complicity.
Inside the relation-image Deleuze separates the mark from the demark. A mark is a thing that means by custom: see X, expect Y. Honor culture is a system of nothing but marks — a letter, a glance held too long in the square, the black of mourning — and Fefè's entire scheme is an attempt to manufacture one. He hires a painter to lure Rosalia, because the town must see what it already expects to see. The demark is the anomaly that jams the customary chain and forces interpretation. Rosalia's fidelity is the demark. She won't betray him. And so the comedy and the cruelty both come from watching a man work harder and harder to produce the sign his culture requires.
Which makes Fefè a forger, in Deleuze's sense: not someone who finds a truth but someone who fabricates one, and who thereby exposes truth as a manufactured good. The delitto d'onore is a legal fiction awaiting a factual input. The fact is missing, so Fefè commissions it. The film belongs to the powers of the false without any of the usual apparatus — no contradictory flashbacks, no labyrinth. The falsity sits in the institution, and Fefè is only its most literal-minded citizen.
Then the daydreams. Deleuze's onirosign, the dream-image, covers fantasy circuits not anchored to any datable memory: quicksand, a rocket, a bullet, each punctured by the cut back to the deadpan face. Germi uses no trickery, only dissolves and staging, so the fantasy arrives in the same black-and-white stock as the street outside. That matters. Fefè's inner life is made of the same cheap operatic material as the culture around him, which is also what Rustichelli's mock-grand score keeps saying, inflating a squalid scheme to the pitch of tragic passion.
The camera takes his side, too. Angela is held in soft, adoring framing; Rosalia is pinned in unflattering, near-caricatural closeness. Deleuze's word for this is the dicisign — perception squared, the camera perceiving a perceiver, so that you feel whose eyes the frame belongs to. The deglamorizing of Daniela Rocca is a stylistic act you can attribute to a character rather than a director, and that is the trap.
Mastroianni's tic is what Deleuze, after Brecht, calls the gest: a posture in which a social relation becomes visible in a body. The performance is built from involuntary things — the twitch, the affectless drawl, the fingering of the holder — and aristocratic languor turns out to be a nervous system under pressure from a code. The décor performs the same exposure at a slower speed. Faded portraits, threadbare finery, a barony with no money: Deleuze found in Visconti the crystal in decomposition, an ordered aristocratic world rotting from inside, and Fefè is a parasite of a dying order who murders to keep his place in it.
Germi inherits his tools honestly. Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street gave him the deadpan template of treating a criminal scheme with straight neorealist observation instead of slapstick; The Great War licensed a mock-serious score turned against a sacred institution. From Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City he keeps location shooting, real streets, non-idealized faces. Bazin read that grammar as an ethic — deep focus preserving the ambiguity of the real, the camera respecting the fact. Germi keeps every tool and inverts the ethic: the same crowded, documentary depth now testifies for the prosecution. And In the Name of the Law is his own earnest 1949 Sicilian drama of honor and omertà, which he here replays as farce. A director becoming his own ancestor is rare enough to be worth naming.
He also cites La Dolce Vita outright, packing the town into a cinema to watch Mastroianni be a Roman god while the same actor sits among them, balding and provincial. Deleuze's consciousness of clichés names that exactly: a film that knows it is moving among images already in circulation and puts that knowledge to work. Germi's specific invention is the fusion — a confessional first-person voice laid over a farce mechanism, so that the target of the satire narrates it himself, charmingly. That is what "…Italian Style" came to mean, and why the phrase survived in English at all.
The last irony closes the circuit: the freed Fefè is already being quietly cuckolded by his young bride. The decisive act changed nothing, because there was never a situation to transform. There was a code, and codes don't resolve. They recur. Germi got inside the action-image and showed that a perfectly functioning sensory-motor circuit can be a description of a trap. The film outlived the law it mocked by nine years.
So the open question is the one the film leaves in your lap and doesn't answer: what is our amusement made of? We laugh because we hold the relation, and holding it puts us on his side for two hours. Watch the cheek. Every time the twitch comes, the film is asking whether you flinched with him or at him.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (relation-image) — The near-constant retrospective voiceover hands us Fefè's murder plan in advance, so the suspense is not whether he's caught but our own knowing complicity — the audience installed as the knowing third.
- mark — The honor code as a chain of customary signs (a look in the piazza, a letter, mourning black); Fefè hires a painter to lure Rosalia precisely so the town will see what it already expects to see.
- demark — Rosalia's stubborn fidelity — the anomaly that jams the habitual sequence of adultery → honor → light sentence and forces the scheme to strain ever harder.
- le faussaire (the forger) — The delitto d'onore requires an adulterous wife the film does not have, so Fefè sets out to manufacture the fact the law demands — truth produced to order.
- action-image, large form — A global situation (marriage law, family, town) presses on Fefè until a single decisive act — the murder — is supposed to transform it; the sensory-motor circuit runs at full power in 1961.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Germi crowds the piazza, church, funeral and rally with watchful townspeople and crams the extended family into the peeling palazzo, staging the milieu itself as the pressure that calls the act forth.
- onirosign (dream-image) — The murder daydreams — wife dispatched by quicksand, by rocket, by a bullet — staged in the same black-and-white with only dissolves, always punctured by the cut back to Fefè's deadpan face.
- dicisign — The camera is complicit with Fefè's gaze: Angela isolated in soft adoring framing, Rosalia pinned in unflattering, near-caricatural closeness — we feel whose perception the frame belongs to.
- the gest — Mastroianni's involuntary facial tic, lidded eyes, affectless drawl and perpetually fingered cigarette holder — an aristocratic posture in which the honor code becomes visible as a nervous condition.
- crystal-decomposition — The décor of aristocratic decay — faded portraits, threadbare finery, the crumbling palazzo — marking Fefè as a parasite of a dying order rotting from within.
- consciousness of clichés — The town flocks to a screening of La Dolce Vita, watching the Mastroianni icon while the seedy provincial Mastroianni sits among them; the film works openly with an image already in circulation.