A Drama of Jealousy (and other things)

A Drama of Jealousy (1970) — or The Pizza Triangle, as American distributors called it — is Ettore Scola's bittersweet Italian tragicomedy, streaming online on iFILM. Marcello Mastroianni took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his role as Oreste, a well-meaning communist bricklayer who is bad at most things except falling hopelessly in love.

The woman in question is Adelaide, a flower vendor played by Monica Vitti. Oreste is not alone in his feelings — Nello, a pizzeria cook played by Giancarlo Giannini, wants her just as badly. What follows is a love triangle set against communist party rallies and the grimy beaches of Ostia, played simultaneously as farce and as something approaching a tragedy.

Scola had spent years before this as a screenwriter on Italian genre comedies, and A Drama of Jealousy marks the point where his darker instincts took over — the bitter irony he honed here feeds directly into his later Ugly, Dirty and Bad. Three actors doing the work of six, against each other, keeps the film alive in a way that the premise alone never could. Watch A Drama of Jealousy (1970) online on iFILM.