Cinema: One Man’s Families

The Climax. The father-to-be nervously paces the hospital corridor, demanding reassurance from doctors and nurses about the coming birth of his child. Surely, the audience decides, it must be his first. But there he is in a phone booth, being fatherly to a family of two young daughters, a 17-year-old boy and pretty brunette wife. He sends them off on a seaside vacation, and there he is on the phone again, talking to another family of two young boys and a pretty blonde mother.

So much domestic bliss would be hard on any man. For Sergio Masini, first violinist in a Roman symphony orchestra, it is literally a labor of love: he adores all three of his families and is scrupulously fair to each. Giulia (Renee Longarini) is his legal wife; Adela (Maria Grazia Carmassi), a onetime opera singer, became his mistress when he began to console her for her cracking voice; and Marisa (Stefania Sandrelli) is a young country girl who fell in love with him at a concert and followed him to Rome. Each of them gets nine phone calls a day from him—a staggering consumption of time and small change.

But this is nothing compared with the meals he consumes in triplicate or the multiple birthdays, anniversaries and holidays that must all be observed. New Year’s Eve, for instance, he celebrates an hour ahead of time with Giulia and children (explaining that he has an orchestra engagement to keep); then follows a tender phone call to Adela and children, then a nightclub date with Marisa. His best friend’s child has to be baptized twice so that both Giulia and Adela can be godmothers.

There is nothing really gay about his deceiver. As played by Ugo Tojnazzi, he is a victim of his own capacity for compassion; it saddens him that all three of his families cannot be unit-id—not for convenience’ sake, but for love. Instead of heaving a sigh of relief when Marisa leaves him to go home, Sergio pursues her—and gets beaten up in rescuing her from her angry peasant family. Though his premiums are soaring, he insists on taking out equal insurance policies for all three women. To make ends meet, he begins moonlighting as a jazz pianist in a honkytonk. A new complication is added when lis son finds him there and dismisses him contemptuously as a buffoon.

Climax has stopped being funny now, as Sergio literally begins to die of loving. Unfortunately, Producer-Writer-Director Pietro Germi almost spoils his curiously bittersweet comedy about the trials of trigamy with a mawkish funeral finale in which Sergio’s voice provides a disembodied commentary. But not even this last false touch dims the luster of Actor Tognazzi’s exquisitely humane performance as a man who loves not wisely but too well.