Truly Dreadful Film

One of my all time favorites.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

In Sicily, the mine worker Carmelo "Mimí" Mardocheo (Giancarlo Giannini) votes in the Communist Party candidate instead of in the Mafia's one believing that the suffrage is secret. After the elections, he loses his job and cannot find any other job in his village that is controlled by the mobster Don Calogero (Turi Ferro). He leaves his wife Rosalia (Agostina Belli) with his family and travels to Turin expecting to find a job.He finds an illegal position in the civil construction that is also explored by the Mafia and when a coworker dies in an accident, he finds that the mobsters have dumped his body on the road. However, he does not report the crime to the police and lies to the mobster Salvatore Tricarico (Turi Ferro) telling that he belongs to the family of a powerful mobster. Mimi gets a metallurgic position and joins the Communist Party. Then he fall in love with the virgin Trotskyite street vendor Fiorella Meneghini (Mariangela Melato) and they have a boy.When Mimi witness the mobster Vico Tricarico (Turi Ferro) executing several men in a hotel, he survives but he does not report to the police. Mimi is transferred to Catania in a supervisory position against his will. He brings Fiore and their son to Sicily, but he is still married with Rosalia but he claims that he is ill and does not have sex with her. When Mimi learns that Rosalia is pregnant, he finds that he is a cuckold and plots a scheme to seduce and knock up Amalia Finocchiaro (Elena Fiore), who is the wife of Rosalia's lover. But his revenge does not work as planned."Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore" is a bitter satire by Lina Wertmüller about a naive and ignorant Sicilian worker that entwines his honor with class warfare, politics and mafia in his miserable life with tragicomic consequences. I saw this movie in the 70's or 80's and today I have just watched the Brazilian DVD that is unfortunately edited to 108 minutes running time. I am a fan of the Italian director Lina Wertmüller and I like this unfunny satire about honor, moral and culture that is dated in the present days but it is impossible to laugh with the ignorance of Mimi and most of his countrymen. This weird movie may be lost between comedy and drama but for me it is an original and cult view of Italy in the early 70's. My vote is seven. Title (Brazil): "Mimi, O Metalúrgico" ("Mimi, The Metallurgic")

This story is culturally valuable because it depicts part of the life of one man in a very universal manner. Mimi is every man: he lusts, he is jealous, he is vulnerable, he wants job security, he has morals and he sometimes compromises them. At the same time, however, Mimi's predicaments are presented in such an exaggerated, humorous manner that they provide relief from the audience's own frustrations. On a more particular level, this film reveals the impact that the "mafia" had on Italian society at this time. Yet, even this is done in so humorous a way as to never seem upsetting. The bitterness of the events that take place—the loss of love, humiliation and misuse of women, the loss of value and the buckling of Mimi to corrupt social powers—are given to an audience with enough comical sugar to allow it to go down easily. And although women are shown objectified and humiliated in this society, the men who do it are shown to be victims of their own absurdities and social traditions as well. This film both exemplifies the dangers of being narcissistic and acting rashly on jealousy and desire, and provides comic relief for a world plagued with problems.

If I were to advice one movie by Lina Wetrmuller - one of the finest Italian directors ever - it would be this one. For this and other movies, you miss a lot of it if you're not Italian, both for the language and for the politics. It is also one of the most political, as it gives a rather crude display of how the industrialized north of Italy exploited the manpower of the less developed south. But it's also a moving love and passion story, and an hilarious comedy. Also, the Giannini-Melato duo is at its best. SORT OF A SPOILER AHEAD: I think the message it delivers is rather a pessimistic and disillusioning one: Mimi' tries to keep his political ideals and his (relatively to his background!) advanced view on love and relationships, but is then bound to fall back to his conservative cultural heritage: on the sentimental side, he's still too jealous of his wife to let her live as free as him; on the political side, as he says in the end, "they're all cousins!" - there's no point in fighting the collusion of political, economical and criminal power that we still have in Italy..

I recently saw this film for the first time. A recent poster said this movie leans "against" social issues....I tend to see the film as capturing a dialectic between the personal and the political... it is political in at least 2 ways that I can see....1) it shows the outrageous inadequacy of bourgeois "democracy" to defend the interests of working people...the Mafia and its candidates who echo the ideology of fascism in the film represent capitalism as both the fulfillment and the negation of the democratic "facade"... (the lead character's descent into crass opportunism as well as his sexual aggression, it is to be noted, are NOT rewarded in the film...at the conclusion, he is profoundly alienated in a scene reminiscent of the final cut of Fellini's La Strada- probably some homage here).... 2) and this is probably the more dominant politically significant theme---this film attempts a radical critique of the institution of bourgeois marriage, through the destructive and artificial role that marriage plays in the film...not only in terms of the patriarchal double-standards, but in the institution's incapacity to most fully satisfy human strivings- female OR male.Whatever one can say about this film, I think anyone who sees it in anyway as a criticism of Communism is misreading the film....Certainly, a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) might understandably cringe at a Party supporter's (Mimi) sexual aggressiveness....but Mimi is apparently a Party "supporter" in the narrowest sense- only in the sense of voting for the Reds (remember PCI has long been a sizeable and popular Party in Italy), and by the end of the film he has DESCENDED to campaigning for a fascistic-Mafia-backed candidate....and the attitude of the PCI towards such a character as Mimi is symbolized by his comrades abandoning him in their red sickle-and- hammer-displaying wagon, disgusted at his sexism and misogyny, with hisopportunistic supporting of rightist candidates obviously the final straw....interestingly in La Strada, the lead character is much worse in terms of violence and maliciousness, and yet Wertmuller leaves us with LESS sympathy for Mimi than does Fellini for the lead role in La Strada, she thankfully spared us gratuitous "pitying" close-ups of Mimi bawling his eyes out.His girlfriend in Turin is NOT a Communist, i.e. a member of the PCI, as she makes clear, but apparently a former-Trotskyite-turned-quasi-Maoist who defensively emphasizes her "independence" from the Party (Trot to Maoist is an unlikelytransformation, btw, since Trots and Maoists are notoriously antipathic to each other-- the only thing uniting them being their dislike of the regular Communist Party)...anyway, if this is kind of ranty it's because I've only seen it once, and I have a lot of thoughts....if a movie gets me thinking like this one, it is on some level a success, I suppose. I enjoyed this film, and particularly felt the ending tied it all together well, and was more satisfying than I would have anticipated.