Ugo Tognazzi, alias “Emerenziano Paronzini against the Three Blazing Tettamanzi Sisters”. That would have been the right title for this movie: an orgy of zeds, blunders, and small-town repressions. Very far from the actual title, so alluring, with unfulfilled promises of hip-swaying maids. Also far from the truest (and most alluring) of them all, the title of Chiara’s novel, La spartizione (The Splitting), which inspired the film. The truest, because it speaks of the unhappy fate of Emerenziano Paronzini, “split” among the Tettamanzi sisters: Camilla, Fortunata, and Tarsilia. True enough also because of the splitting that Emerenziano himself does of the sisters. He stages morceaux choisis inside his own hallucinating mind: of Tarsilia he will choose her beautiful legs, of Camilla her soft and tapering hands, and of Fortunata her hair. This is because fetishism – which can also be that of the camera, every time it frames a piece of the world in a close-up – is a process by which a partial object (normally not an erogenous one) is abstracted and transformed into an object of desire. That, more or less, is what Freud proclaimed more than a century ago. It’s too late now to ask Lattuada about Freud. Anyway, he would probably say he hasn’t even read a line of Freud. But we know perfectly that they are both speak- ing about the same thing.
Gualtiero De Marinis