Il merlo maschio
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Il merlo maschio (1970, Italian: The Male Blackbird) is an Italian film directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile starring Laura Antonelli and Lando Buzzanca. The film is an exploration of candaulism.
Story
The husband Niccolò Vivaldi, is a frustrated viola player (Lando Buzzanca), with a static career, and not receiving any praise form his orchestra director, begins to take photographs of his beloved wife in poses that slowly became pornographic. Soon after this he begins to show the images to his friend and colleague Cavalmoretti (Lino Toffolo) and in a secondo moment to all the other members of the orchestra, in an exhibitionistic crescendo that will led him to expose her wife (by an apparent accident with her dress) before all the public of Verona's Arena, during the showing of Aida.
In this way he shouted out his frustration, and arrived to be envied, when He managed to expose her most admirable and unreachable good (nobody could stole him her wife, because in Italy there was'nt divorce). And the young, beautiful and dumb wife (Laura Antonelli, a perplexed but pleasant woman from the countryside) that accepts to be carried inside a violoncello's case, in order to be shown over a bridge in Verona (an idea that seems a marvelous quoting of renown photograph by the dadaist artist Man Ray).
Comment
This motion picture was filmed in Verona, and it shows many situations in the environment of practicing symphonic orchestras that at certain moment of the year are allowed to play in Arena. Il Merlo Maschio represents the Commedia all'italiana.
Unlike most Italian comedy films in that epoch, always repeating the storyboards of the first erotic dreams of the symbolic teenager Pierino, or the arousal reactions of secluded soldiers that watch for the first time the shapes of a beauty queen (Gloria Guida, ecc.). The Male Blackbird is also a light and discrete sociologic presentation of the theme of candaulism, something very frequent today (husbands that buy transparent panties and bras for their wives) but that was very rare at those times: the apparently casual, but carefully planned exposing of the spouse by his husband (Candaulism is classified by psychiatrist as a mania or paraphilia).
See also
