Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mafioso
1962 · Alberto Lattuada · Mafioso on Sightlines
Begin with the stopwatch. In Milan, Antonio Badalamenti, called Nino, runs his corner of the factory floor by the clock: he times, he checks, he keeps the line in order. Alberto Sordi plays him as a man in love with this order, and proud of it. It proves he made it. He has a Northern wife, two daughters, a modern life that runs on schedule. Then he takes them home to Sicily on holiday, and the first thing we notice is that the stopwatch has nothing to measure there. Time in the village is kept by meals, greetings, and who kisses whose hand first.
Mafioso is usually filed as commedia all'italiana, the Italian comedy of the late 1950s and 1960s that used broad laughs to carry bitter social satire. That label is right. But Alberto Lattuada does something inside the genre that Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us words for. Those words help explain why the film's warmth is so unsettling.
Deleuze argued that classical cinema runs on what he called the action-image. A character sees a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Hero meets problem, hero solves problem. Most of the movies we grew up on work this way. In the years after the war, he said, that circuit started to break. Characters began to perceive things they could not answer with action. He called this the crisis of the action-image: a person in a situation where acting would make sense, and who doesn't act.
Nino is a textbook case, and an unusually sly one, because he thinks of himself as a man of action. In the North his gestures work. In Sicily he keeps making them, showing off his wife, his car-factory polish, his success, and they land on nothing. The village absorbs them. Sordi's great skill is to let us watch the comedy drain out of Nino through his face and body, with little help from dialogue. He doesn't rebel. He complies. The film's tension lives in the gap between how much he seems to want to say no and how little he can.
Why does he comply? Here a second Deleuzian idea is useful, the gest. Deleuze borrowed it from Brecht: a posture or attitude of the body that exposes a social relation. Lattuada stages Sicily as a choreography of gests. The film never introduces the mafia as spectacle, with guns, sinister music or shadowed rooms. It shows deference. Watch how bodies arrange themselves around Don Vincenzo, the local boss: who stands, who waits, who is served first at the table. Favors and unspoken debts are built into ordinary hospitality. Nothing is said, because nothing needs to be. Each bow is what Deleuze calls a mark, a gesture whose meaning comes from habit, from a chain everyone in the room already knows. Nino knows it too. He learned it before he learned the stopwatch.
That is why this lens opens the film up. Read as a straight crime story, Mafioso would be about a man forced into something. Read through the gest, it shows something worse. The obligation and the belonging Nino craves are one and the same thing. The warmth is the trap. Every embrace from a relative is also a reminder of whom he belongs to. Deleuze has a term for a concrete, sunlit milieu that turns out to be the surface of something older and more savage underneath: the derived milieu laid over an originary world. The Sicilian town, with its dust, strong light and crowded tables, is shot as real and specific. Beneath it the film keeps letting us feel an archaic code that has no interest in Milan, in factories, or in the twentieth century.
Armando Nannuzzi's black-and-white photography carries this double layer. The Milanese scenes are clean and ordered. The Sicilian ones are bright and open, keyed to hard Southern light, and that brightness gradually tightens around Nino. Black and white keeps the island from becoming a travelogue; it gives the village a documentary hardness, so the comedy always sits on top of something solid and unsentimental. Piero Piccioni's score helps the comedy along, then pulls back.
Lattuada didn't invent this doubleness here. It was his method well before. Variety Lights, which he co-directed with Fellini in 1950, already held a warm ensemble comedy over a layer of humiliation, laughter and cruelty sharing the frame. The screenwriters Age & Scarpelli had made crime cuddly in Big Deal on Madonna Street, and in The Great War they ran broad comedy straight into a blow it refused to cushion. Mafioso inherits both moves and poisons the first with the second. Sordi brings his own lineage. Fellini's I Vitelloni had used him as the vain provincial exposed by his own bluster, and An American in Rome built his signature braggart, the ingratiating everyman who performs assimilation. Here Lattuada takes that likable persona, which audiences adored, and asks what it is capable of being used for. Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style, a year earlier, aimed at the same target, Sicilian codes of honor and the code of silence, and also treated a lethal custom as material for cold farce.
What Mafioso did to film was to move the mafia out of the genre of thrills and into the genre of manners. Decades before the American gangster epics made the subject a global myth, Lattuada had shown it as a social texture: a matter of seating plans and handshakes, of a man's own longing to be welcomed. Its narrative idea is that the comedy is part of the trap, not a relief from it. We enjoy Nino's homecoming the way he does.
So watch for the gestures. Watch who moves first when Don Vincenzo enters, and watch Sordi's face when Nino realizes his stopwatch-sharp competence counts for nothing in that room. The question the film leaves us with isn't how a modern man can be pulled back into an old world. It's whether he ever left.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Nino, a man of action and order in the Milan factory, finds that his gestures of success land on nothing in Sicily; Sordi plays a man who complies instead of rebelling, his entrapment shown through face and body more than dialogue
- the gest — Lattuada stages Sicily as a social choreography of ritual and hierarchy: meals, greetings, the deference owed to Don Vincenzo, the mafia shown as who defers to whom rather than as spectacle
- mark — favors and unspoken debts built into ordinary hospitality; gestures of deference whose meaning everyone in the village, Nino included, reads by habit
- derived milieu over an originary world — the concretely shot, sunlit Sicilian town of dust, light and crowded tables, presented as the surface of an archaic code that reasserts its claim on Nino
- affection-image — Sordi tracks Nino's dawning entrapment largely through the face, a feeling registered but held back from action, never breaking the surface of ordinariness