The most secure prison is not the one with bars on its windows, but the one sanctified by law and tradition. It is a gilded cage of habits, sideways glances, and murmured obligations, a labyrinth from which the only contemplated escape is death. Pietro Germi, with "Divorce Italian Style," does not simply film this labyrinth; he installs within it a ridiculous, sweaty Minotaur—Baron Ferdinando "Fefè" Cefalù—and orchestrates his desperate, hilarious, and ultimately tragic search for Ariadne's thread. The film, from its very title which christened an entire genre, presents itself as a programmatic oxymoron: to unite the brutality of a criminal act with the apparent lightness of comedy, transforming a social drama into a grotesque farce of surgical precision.

We are in Sicily, in Agramonte, a place that transcends geography to become a state of mind, a stage where the sun doesn't illuminate but bakes, bleaching the facades and the brains. The very air seems thick with gossip and unspoken judgments. Here lives Fefè, played by a Marcello Mastroianni who commits an act of sublime self-sabotage. The actor, just consecrated as an icon of style and melancholy intellectualism in "La dolce vita," sheds every last vestige of glamour to embody a decadent nobleman whose sole activity is managing his own boredom and repressed libido. His nervous tic at the mouth, the way he chain-smokes, the perpetual sweat on his brow: Mastroianni doesn't play Fefè, he perspires him. It is a performance at the opposite pole of his stardom, an operation of deconstruction reminiscent of a great Shakespearean actor who, after playing Hamlet, throws himself headlong into the role of a pathetic, provincial Falstaff.

The plot, in its diabolical simplicity, is a clockwork mechanism worthy of a Boccaccio tale injected with Kafkaesque poison. In an Italy where divorce is an illegal utopia, but the "crime of honour" is punished with an almost symbolic sentence, Fefè conceives a plan as logical as it is monstrous: to induce his wife Rosalia (a superb Daniela Rocca, whose oppressive physicality is the perfect incarnation of the marital trap) to commit adultery so he can catch her in the act, kill her, and, after a brief and honorable detention, marry his young and angelic cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). The narration, entrusted to Fefè's own voice-over, is not a simple expository device but the film's beating heart. It is the interior monologue of an operetta Raskolnikov, a logbook that transforms a homicidal plan into a bureaucratic project, a "case file" to be handled with meticulous care. This narrative device makes us complicit in his thoughts, allowing us to spy on the world through his distorted gaze, where reality constantly bends to his paranoid fantasy. The dream sequences, in which he imagines getting rid of his wife in the most creative ways—from a bar of soap to a pressure cooker—are not mere gags, but incursions into a subconscious that has metabolized violence as the only possible solution, a Grand Guignol aesthetic applied to married life.

Germi directs not a comedy, but a horror film in disguise. The camera moves with the curiosity of an entomologist studying a nest of insects. The sudden zooms on faces, the close-ups that isolate grotesque details, the crowd of relatives and townspeople moving like a Greek chorus in black, commenting not with words but with looks and gestures: everything contributes to creating an asphyxiating atmosphere. Agramonte is not a community, but an open-air panopticon, a single-celled organism whose sole imperative is the preservation of honour—which is to say, of the facade. It is the same claustrophobic universe Luis Buñuel might have imagined for "The Exterminating Angel," but stripped of its surrealism and steeped in an all-the-more-terrifying hyperrealism. Fefè's real prison is not his marriage to Rosalia, but the gaze of others. His plan is not just an act of personal liberation, but a desperate attempt to manipulate collective judgment, to transform a murder into a socially approved act, almost a civic duty.

The film is a merciless dissection of masculinity in crisis. Fefè is the antithesis of the Latin lover. He is impotent, not only sexually (as is suggested on more than one occasion), but socially and intellectually. His fantasies of conquest and domination collide with a reality in which he is a puppet moved by the strings of tradition. His obsession with the young Angela is not love, but an aspiration for a purity and vitality he feels he has lost, an attempt to vampirize youth to feel alive again. In this, his character approaches those of certain protagonists of Central European literature, like Musil's "Man Without Qualities," a being defined only in the negative, by his inability to act and to be. Fefè, however, unlike his literary counterparts, decides to act, and his action is a grotesque caricature of tragic heroism: an epic in reverse, where the great undertaking is not founding a city or winning a war, but orchestrating the most squalid of uxoricides.

The genius of "Divorce Italian Style" lies in its perfect tonal balance. It is a film that makes you roar with laughter, but it's a laughter that freezes in your throat, that leaves a bitter, ashen aftertaste. It is the black humor of a Billy Wilder steeped in acid, where cynicism is not a stylistic affectation but a moral necessity. The satirical framework is so powerful because it does not condemn the characters, who in their human misery seem almost forgivable, but rather the system that produced them. The law on the crime of honour (which, it is worth remembering, was only repealed in 1981) is the film's true villain, an abstract and monstrous entity that turns ordinary people into potential murderers. Germi, along with screenwriters Ennio De Concini and Alfredo Giannetti, does not pass judgment but lays out the facts with the lucidity of a medical report, letting the absurdity of the situation speak for itself.

And then, there is the ending. A stroke of genius that elevates the film from a masterpiece of satire to a universal tragedy. After carrying out his plan, Fefè is finally free, on a boat with his beloved Angela. The sun is shining, the sea is calm. It seems to be the happy ending he so longed for. But the camera, with a slow, inexorable movement, drifts down the young bride's body to reveal her foot caressing that of the young helmsman. Fefè's sunglasses, which throughout the film have been a symbol of his desire to appear a man of the world, become the blinders that prevent him from seeing the truth. The prison has not been demolished; it has only changed its furnishings. The cycle is destined to repeat itself, in an eternal comedy of the absurd where freedom is merely the interval between one sentence and the next. It is an ending with the geometric perfection of an Escher paradox and the cruelty of a Brothers Grimm fairytale. Fefè has not been liberated; he has simply swapped his old jailer for a new one. His quest for a divorce "Italian style" has concluded with the most Italian of marriages: a splendid facade that conceals an inevitable, and perhaps desired, betrayal. Germi's masterpiece remains a perfect cinematic object, a black diamond that shines with a sinister and irresistibly intelligent light.