Il marito in campagna

A bourgeois husband, weary of urban clamor, flees Rome’s marble labyrinth for the promise of pastoral quietude, only to discover that the countryside is no Edenic sanctuary but a carnival of lust, jealousy, and domestic farce. His wife—equal parts Circe and child—toys with a rogue’s gallery of provincial admirers: a swaggering foreman whose moustache twitches like a divining rod for trouble, a mute shepherd whose gaze carries the ache of unspoken sonnets, and a tattered priest whose cassock flutters like a guilty conscience. Each dawn, the mist clings to the olive groves like a secret; each dusk, cicadas crescendo in mockery of the husband’s fraying vows. Furniture wobbles, appetites swell, and a single jilted love letter—hidden inside a flour jar—turns the rustic kitchen into a courtroom. When the husband finally dons the cuckold’s horns, he does so not with tragic grandeur but with the slapstick resignation of a man whose umbrella has been stolen by the rain. The film ends on a tight shot of a broken birdcage swinging in the breeze: freedom, or merely the echo of it.