Young Love--Sicilian Style

Seduced and Abandoned. The girl's name is Agnese, a raven-haired sylph with the face of a Botticelli angel. Head high, eyes cast demurely downward, she moves with easy grace through the cobblestone streets of the small Sicilian village while the camera follows, falling slowly in love with her. So does the audience. Thus Director Pietro Germi eases smoothly into a black and bitter tragicomedy that shows his worldly, wildly wicked Divorce--Italian Style to be an exercise in restraint. In Seduced and Abandoned, by contrast, Germi's underlying despair keeps burning to the surface. "This time," he explains, "I would like the public to hate me a little."

Having established the innocence of his angel (Stefania Sandrelli), Germi first thrusts her into an earthy peasant farce. One midday siesta she is seduced and becomes pregnant. Her father, played with inexhaustible bravura by Saro Urzi, consults a lawyer cousin, explaining that the doctor has brought up a little problem about Agnese. "Tumor?" asks the cousin. "Honor," growls Don Vincenzo. He sends his only son Antonio to murder the seducer, assured that the boy's punishment will be no more than three to seven years in prison, provided he can prove that he killed "in a blind rage."

To this point, the comedy brims with drolly catalogued details of village and family life. The laughter fades as Germi shows, in scene after scene, how ignorance, hypocrisy and habit can transmogrify normal human problems into sunny Sicilian-nightmares. Trying every tactic from simple perjury to a trumped-up kidnaping, Don Vincenzo struggles to marry off Agnese and salvage his honor, for his worst fear is that he might become an object of ridicule in the piazza. "We are an old family," Don Vincenzo tells the police. "I admit we've had some violent deaths--but outside the law, in dignity." Agnese no longer matters. She is beaten, jeered at, and finally led to the altar as if she were a schoolgirl dragged to stage center of a savage burlesque. In a grim postscript, the camera cuts from the stricken Agnese to mock the words "Honor and Family" on a nobleman's tomb.

Abandoned emerges as an erratic but deeply affecting work by an artist able to project a commonplace theme with blinding brio. Germi leavens his anger with compassion, lightens compassion with humor. And one pointed vignette embodies all three: a hard-pressed chief of the carabinieri, studying a wall map of Italy, impulsively flattens his palm over the entire island of Sicily and utters a long, long sigh.

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