Review of the comedy “The Indecisive Groom” by Giorgio Amato

The Italian comedy “The Indecisive Bridegroom” (Lo sposo indeciso che non poteva o forse non voleva piu uscire dal bagno) is in theaters. Mikhail Trofimenkov At first I was horrified by the film, almost the entire plot of which revolves around the frantic urination of the main character, but then I came to terms with it.

At first it seems that there is a social humor about misalliance, most likely with a feminist accent. Professor of “moral philosophy” Gianni, with the eloquent surname Buridano (Gianmarco Tognazzi), referring to the legendary Buridan’s donkey, falls head over heels in love with the university scrubber Samantha (Ilenia Pastorelli), thirty-five years younger than him.

It doesn’t matter that Gianni is not just an atheist, but “the standard of anti-clerical thought,” while Samantha’s family are Catholic football fans. The car is already rushing Gianni to the temple, where, like it or not, he will have to get married, when something terrible happens.

More precisely, terrible things happen to both the groom and the bride. Samantha falls down the stairs, twists her ankle and breaks her nose. Compared to this, what Gianni wants to write seems like nothing.

However, Samantha’s nose will be fixed and she will be taken to the church. But from the moment Gianni gets to the church in the company of a witness and a colleague, a teacher at an American university, the action moves to the temple toilet. Gianni can’t stop. And the more furiously the rain pours down on the street, the more furiously it pours out of the professor.

It would seem that the more furious the process of urination, the more disgust the action should cause: toilet humor, what can you take from it. But the exact opposite is happening. The professor’s misfortune not only infects with sincere sympathy for him, but also becomes a metaphor for insoluble metaphysical contradictions, which seem to have no place in the modern world, but here they are.

The space of the temple toilet is transformed into a kind of ancient forum, where interpretations of the phenomenon and, accordingly, versions of the world order collide. Well, pure Mikhail Bakhtin, adored by Italian intellectuals. “Flesh bottom” and “flesh top” change places. The unfortunate Gianni rises to the level of a Rabelaisian hero.

Of course, life and death dance a waltz in an embrace. The time allotted for the wedding ceremony is long over, and Gianni is still peeing. The guests of the next funeral ceremony had already arrived, and Gianni was stuck to the urinal.

The undertaker from the “second team” looks with interest at the potential client, handing out his business cards to the bride’s relatives. An American friend is spewing high-flown nonsense about the psychoanalytic causes of severe enuresis. Heated toilet debates erupt about the difference between enuresis and diaeresis – a phonetic phenomenon of ancient verse.

The three-nosed temple cleaning lady climbs wherever they ask, threatening Gianni with hellfire for spilling a drop on the consecrated tile and hinting at a witchcraft spell. Looming somewhere in the background is the Internet sorceress Cecilia, who has supplied Samantha’s mother (the ageless Ornella Muti) with some kind of yellow potion. And the dachshund Spinoza barks.

The husband of the deceased who never received a funeral service turns out to be a leading endocrinologist in Italy, trying in vain to help Gianni. The orderlies shrug their shoulders, unable to figure out how to get an uncontrollable patient to the hospital. And Gianni keeps peeing and crying. And the more she pees, the more she cries. And the more she cries, the more she pees.

Because he was the only one who realized that physiology had nothing to do with his misfortune. And that he himself is a victim of an insoluble contradiction between faith and unbelief, religion and magic, love and pride. A kind of Christian, well, or anti-Christian martyr.

Well, the martyr’s job is to suffer, and the rest will sigh, cross themselves and go to football.