Wifemistress

A sickly Antonelli emerges from a moribund marriage to become a New Woman in the course of this classic comedy of concealment, deception, and revelation, played out in Northern Italy in the early 1900s. Vicario, through velvety, sensual camerawork, captures an era of intense intellectual and physical restlessness, when Italy dusted off the Belle Epoque and feverishly embraced anarchism, atheism, science, social reform, egalitarianism, and when political and sexual excitement might have seemed interchangeable. The film's shimmering eroticism is delicious. Bertolucci might have made this, if he wasn't such a prig.