Cinema: Separation–Italian Style

The Hours of Love is the latest evidence of the low esteem in which Italian moviemakers hold matrimony. Unlike Divorce—Italian Style, Marriage —Italian Style, and the other changes that have recently been rung in Italy on the dissolubility of marriage, Hours is not trying to be funny so much as ruefully amusing. And it succeeds fairly well, thanks mostly to French Actress Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and Ugo Tognazzi, one of Italy’s busiest actors.

Gianni (Tognazzi) and Maretta (Riva) are lovers and loving it. They love it so much that they get married and move into his apartment in Rome. “Now we can do anything we want!” exults Maretta. “Sing, kiss . . .”

First the singing dies down, then the kissing. Sundays are the worst. She loathes yelling the afternoon away at the soccer match; he can’t stand concerts. Director Luciano Salce watches them so well, as they quarrel about money and friends and whether to go out or stay home, that even the familiar soap-opera material comes alive—the painful propinquity of two sour, seedy people sharing the bathroom in the morning, the wife-switchy tension that flickers beneath the surface as a bored foursome takes a Sunday drive.

The Hours is also enlivened by a couple of wild parties that are good to watch, thanks chiefly to a stunning Negro in a low-cut evening dress, of whom one of the guests says: “Under the shower she shines like a horse!” But the film’s major flaw is a phony, febrile ending that shows the older and wiser married couple dispiritedly going back to their premarital assignations because, as the sound track intones, “The hours of love are scattered and fleeting.”