Seduced and Abandoned (intro, topic sentences & conclusion) -- sample

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1 Saving Agnese: Comedy and Social Justice in Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned NOTE: This sample comes from a final-paper assignment in a different course (not focused solely on the Sicilian Mafia). As a result, the analysis here is not Mafia-centered, and the number of bullet points is greater than what is possible in a shorter film-analysis essay. Nevertheless, the introduction, topic sentences, and conclusion are instructive: they offer clear approaches to developing and delivering an interpretive, historically-minded analysis of this film as a humanistic text. Introduction : Though it is one of the landmark works of the commedia all’italiana , there is something frightening and ferocious at the heart of Seduced and Abandoned , Pietro Germi’s scathing satire of Southern society and its code of ‘onore e famiglia.’ Set in the still-backwards Sicily of the early 1960s, it is a powerful example of how the genre was able to make use of humour to transform the neorealist penchant for social commentary into critique with a decidedly sharper edge. Taking on amoral familism, patriarchal machismo, and a legal code that caters to it, Seduced and Abandoned is an unrelenting two hours of pitch-black humour and caricatures that border on the grotesque. Unsentimental in the extreme, Germi takes a scalpel to Southern society and Article 544 of the Italian criminal code (reparatory marriage), unflinchingly exposing their backwardness and hypocrisy. No one escapes his criticism – not even the film’s brave and longsuffering protagonist, Agnese, who finally marries the man who so callously uses and abuses her. Ultimately, in spite of its often painfully funny send-ups of Southern stereotypes, Seduced and Abandoned is a truly bleak film about the brutality of a patriarchal culture that upheld family honour above all else, including the human rights of its individual (especially female) members and the rule of law. Though it did not attempt to present a solution to the problems it exposed, Germi’s unrelenting anger lent a powerful voice to many who continued to be oppressed within postwar Italy’s “civil society.” • In a film that explores the anomaly of traditional southern Italian mores in the modern postwar world, the plot of Seduced and Abandoned is built on a critique of the Italian criminal code that propped up the violence and individual repression that characterized the southern ‘honour’ code and its associated underworld. • Germi constructs his criticism in the grand tradition of Italian comedy, and with a deceptively simple premise: 15-year-old Agnese Ascalone is seduced and impregnated by Peppino Califano, her elder sister’s fiancé. When he refuses to marry her, her father must wrangle a shotgun wedding in order to prevent her from being shamed in front of the town. Put in these terms, the scenario sounds charmingly old-fashioned; but in Germi’s capable hands, it morphs into something far darker. • As with everything else in his farce, Germi’s use of the town and its landscape is unsubtle and to the point: ‘backwards’ Sicily provides the ideal location to play out the film’s dual critique of the amoral honour code and its inherent misogyny. • As previously mentioned, in Seduced and Abandoned , one of Germi’s most fascinating engagements with the Southern notion of ‘onore’ deals with the (attempted) construction of a coherent ‘justice’ system in the absence of the rule of law. • Nowhere is this process and its logical outcome more blatantly illustrated than when Peppino is jailed and the Califanos broach the subject of a second engagement with Don Vincenzo.

2 • This particular scene encapsulates Germi’s response to honour-bound pseudo-morality, namely, that there is no true justice possible in a system that treats onore like a spectator sport. • Given this patriarchal precondition, the second of the South’s great ethical aberrations very quickly becomes apparent: in Seduced and Abandoned , women are consistently objectified, existing in its world as servants, playthings, pets and punching bags. • Tellingly, we first encounter the bulk of the town fathers in the local hotel amid a riveting debate about the number of times a “real man” will ejaculate in his lifetime. While such juvenile posturing is comic, the film’s pointed objectification of the women who interrupt it reveals Germi’s disgust. • With this, the scene in which we meet the town’s male population as a whole, Germi completely discredits them and removes the audience’s ability to take them seriously. The scene also does more than entertain: it sets the tone for the way women are treated throughout the film. • Though the town’s patriarchs undeniably bear the brunt of Germi’s ire as he exposes the rampant chauvinism of the machismo culture, embedded within the outrage is the equally fundamental question of why these women allow themselves to be victimized. Conclusion : As foreign as the world of Seduced and Abandoned must have seemed to outside audiences in 1964, its crumbling, desolate, anachronistic setting reflected the contemporary reality of an Italian criminal code that was caught in a time-warp, representing a chauvinistic, patriarchal worldview that had as little to do with the modern postwar world as the film’s fictional town. Taking its cue from Article 544, Germi’s scathing satire took on the twin problems of onore and the subjection of women in a patriarchal Southern society that was fundamentally and unapologetically retrograde. In playing out Article 544 in this context, Germi made it readily apparent that the Code’s emphasis on an outdated notion of family, honour, and morality was tantamount to the perpetuation of the kind of individual repression that the postwar Republic’s constitution specifically set out to avoid. It called attention to the ridiculousness of laws geared toward a society that absolutely rejected the rule of law and public justice in favour of the code of ‘onore,’ a repressive system of social control that valued no higher good than the maintenance of the patriarchal status quo. Ultimately, the power of Seduced and Abandoned lay in its singular ability to take a scalpel to the veneer of ‘civilization’ that covered the southern cult of family honour and excoriate it, revealing the brutality hidden beneath. In turning the spotlight on the dehumanization of individuals that so characterized ‘onore,’ Seduced and Abandoned constituted a clarion call for the kind of lasting reformation that would provide justice for the Agneses of southern Italy.

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