The Second Wife (Italian: La seconda moglie) is a 1998 Italian coming-of-age comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Ugo Chiti and starring Maria Grazia Cucinotta. It premiered at the 55th Venice International Film Festival.
Contents
Plot
The plot follows Anna, a Sicilian single mother who marries an older, crass widowed truck driver named Fosco in the early 1960s. When Fosco is arrested for smuggling an antique, Anna develops an emotional and romantic attachment to his handsome teenage stepson, Livio.
Cast
Maria Grazia Cucinotta as Anna
Lazar Ristovski as Fosco
Giorgio Noè as Livio
Candida Vettori as Stella
Jessica Auriemma as Santina
Sergio Pierattini as Uncle Moreno
Stefano Abbati as Uncle Umberto
Patrizia Corti as Fernanda
Pietro Fornaciari as Sirio
Dante Daddi as Omero
Production
The film was shot in Tuscany, with principal photography starting in August 2017.
Release
The film had its world premiere at the 55th edition of the Venice Film Festival, in the Prospectives sidebar.
Reception
Variety's critic David Rooney described the film as a "technically polished" film with a "cliched story" that looks like "a comparatively chaste version of the rustic sexfests made by Tinto Brass in the 1980s". Svet Atanasov from DVD Talk favorably compared the film to Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna and called it "a pleasant surprise" and "a very enjoyable film, one that relies on a well structured plot bringing quite a twist to the finale".
Paolo Mereghetti panned the film, describing it as "a festival of banalities" that "looks like a Mulino Bianco commercial".