The Birds, the Bees and the Italians
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. The Birds, the Bees and the Italians won the twelfth Palme d’Or — temporarily reverted back to the Grand Prix — at the 1966 festival, which it shared with A Man and a Woman.
The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Sophia Loren.
Jury: Marcel Achard, Vinicius de Moraes, Tetsuro Furukaki, Maurice Genevoix, Jean Giono, Maurice Lehmann, Richard Lester, Denis Marion, André Maurois, Marcel Pagnol, Yuli Raizman, Armand Salacrou, Peter Ustinov.
So far, my least favourite Palme d’Or winner is the incredibly problematic The Knack …and How to Get It, and it almost feels like I am highly correct in my repulsion stemming from the film’s awful handling of sexual conquests because of how insultingly quickly Cannes gave the same award to such a similar — and far better — film. The Birds, the Bees and the Italians is also a sex comedy that satirizes human nature and the perversions of the swinging 60s, but it is such a more thoughtful take on the topic that The Knack feels almost instantly redundant (if it doesn’t feel that way by now through the test of time). In Pietro Germi’s film (made towards the latter end of his thirty year career), we get three anthological chapters all centred around the thirstiness of lonely people. It’s the kind of approach that likely would have been a flop if handled by many other directors, but Germi was kind of the master at sillier depictions of marital and relationship problems (see his magnum opus Divorce Italian Style for more on that note), so this Cannes favourite works well enough to matter.
The first tale debunks the idiocies of self pity when lies are used to coverup hidden truths, and we can sit and gawk at the fabrications that take place before our very eyes. Comeuppance feels sweet when you don’t root for the protagonist, and thus is the case with this opening vignette. In the second part, you can quickly begin to catch on that Germi doesn’t really think highly of his fellow male, and this will hold true for the remainder of The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. The penultimate story has a different sense of karma, with the weight of an entire community conspiring against an awful man who dumps his wife for his new fling. The final narrative involves something a little testier, with the entire town trying to win the affections of a teenager; while a gross (yet necessary) look at the awful lengths of perverted men, it’s interesting to see how it was a town that tried to save the day in the second story, and yet it is a town that is acting inappropriately this time around. Germi mirrors and links his triptych thematically enough that there is a cohesive semblance to all of this lustful madness.
All three stories in The Birds, the Bees and the Italians hold up well enough to make for a solid watch.
Like The Knack, this film is often times awkward to watch, but I definitely feel like Germi has so much more to say about objectification, sexual addiction, and the foolishness of the elite and their fetishes. Unlike the other film, The Bird, the Bees and the Italians is actually entertaining, and the satire makes sense and hits the majority of its notes with ease. You never feel like the film is condoning these awful behaviours, because you are always aware that you are watching buffoonery. There is a lot of self awareness and self deprecation that you feel in on the joke and connected to the messages. This film is only a taste of Pietro Germi and his very best material, but it also feels like an appetizer board of what he can do, so a Palme d’Or win here for someone as acclaimed and beloved as he makes sense. Germi is able to poke fun and toss in a few scathing observations so effortlessly, and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians has this talent on full display.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.