BurlFilm

Il Bell ‘ Antonio
Beautiful Antonio
Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale
Dir -
Mauro Bologini

IMDB

The beginning is overplayed, and the Italian references to the importance of sexual strength on the part of the man is entirely tedious, but as the film improves this serves fairly well as a backdrop for the developing plot. Mastroianni is the ‘Bell ‘ Antonio’ – the beautiful Antonio, 30 or so, returning home, the stuff of legend, for his apparent female conquests in Rome, the Capitol. It is set, I believe, in Sicily. Yes, all the women fall for him, but there is a catch, which we see developed in his subsequent marriage to Camille Claudelle.
With Plot Giveaways:
If his story is to be believed, the hero is impotent but only with women he truly cares for, at least at first, and than with all women. Yet he loves women, and they fall over him at first sight. He was convinced, he says, that Camille would cure him of this, but he is wrong, and after a year, and no consummation, the marriage is dissolved by her father and she is remarried. Antonio is devastated, and his father, in a fit of attempting to prove (to himself,a dn to anyone who would hear about it) that the family line was not afflicted in the way of the son, visits a whore, and at age 60, has a heart attack in her arms and dies. The Lovely, timid and somewhat hunched young housekeeper, who has looked upon Antonio with genuine affection through the film, is found to be pregnant. The mother, seeing as only Antonio was around, fixates on him as the only possible father, to which the girl (and even Antonio) concurs, although it is quite clear that the dead father is the father of unborn child as well. So Antonio is to be come the father to his own sibling. It is a tragedy with a false resolution – but a resolution nevertheless. The public necessity of proving the verity of the son is shown in the expanding belly of the housekeeper, and so his sorrow is transferred back to a private personal problem – now shared by his soon-to-be wife. Externally, resolution needs only an apparent result, whereas internally, something more is needed. For after all there was some psychological trauma identified (described) by the protagonist, associated with his lack of comfort with physical love (when connected with spiritual love – the very definition, according to the film and the Pope, of marriage). So there could be real resolution for our hero, beyond the false public exoneration, but we will not see it. It is ripe than for a sequel. It’s as if the film has a hinted at psychological depth, that would add much needed weight to the crass and shallow beginning of the film. Caudelle is wonderfully, and Mastrionni is very convincing, as is the housegirl. The cast is very good. The plot is sound, once it gets past all the blustering. A movie, surprisingly, to make one think. Perhaps the director should read Stendhal’s proposed solution to impotence, to see the wider range of feeling (and action) that could be taken in the face of private and very real difficulties.