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Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are one of cinema’s greatest love teams. But there was rarely anything rose-tinted about their romances and the grit of life very much scuffs the superficial gloss of this Neapolitan sex comedy.

At his former lover’s deathbed, Mastroianni’s prosperous playboy thinks back on a relationship that began 20 years earlier during an air raid and saw Loren plucked from a bordello and installed first in a fancy apartment and then, after a period of estrangement, as his tyrannical mother’s maid. Promising to marry Sophia out of guilt, Marcello is appalled when she recovers and then announces he is the father of one of her three sons.

What makes De Sica’s battles of the sexes so trenchant is their frank approach to lust and their sly compassion for caddish characters. Moral standards may have changed much in the past four decades, but human nature has not and, thus, the bourgeois snobbery and hypocrisy that the long-suffering Loren endures makes her own duplicity seem all the more delicious and justifiable.

 

David Parkinson on 28th April 2009
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