This film more clearly defines the characteristics of the commedia all’italiana, achieving greater maturity through an attentive study of its character’s use of language. In Dramma della gelosia, the language spoken by the various characters is more than a means of expression, it is a way of being. The flower-seller consumes photo-romances that inspire her vision of the world. Language determines her destiny, turning her into a comic book heroine, torn between two loves, as in a popular illustrated novel; it is both the bearer of romance and of a destiny marked by love and death. During the economic boom and rising consumerism Adelaide adapts to the need to study English, the language of the future. Other languages in the film derive from political practice. Mastroianni interprets the part of an elderly comrade who expresses himself using the jargon he learned at party meetings; a language usually employed to address political themes is here transposed onto the individual dramas of a workman. […] Dramma della gelosia anticipates themes that, many years later, would become material for sociological analysis: such as the relationship between the main leftwing parties and the radical leftist movements of Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. The third character, played by Giannini, is a Tuscan pizza-maker, an anarchist and extremist with a background in fringe politics; he had previously shared ideals and friendship with the elderly communist before they were compromised by betrayal, fracture and romantic riva ry. In the commedia all’italiana, the observation of reality (typical of Neorealism and the films that followed) is complemented by an investigation into themes that were beginning to surface in the collective consciousness. Another characteristic of the film – more specific to the director than the Italian comedy in general – is its narrative method; the ironic cinematic language of a film that is neither a detective story, a police thriller, no an investigation, but rather an unseen, ‘off-screen’ trial, one through which the characters converse with their future judges.

Ettore Scola in Ettore Scola. Il cinema e io. Conversazione con Antonio Bertini, Officina Edizioni, Rome 1996