La donna della domenica (The Sunday Woman)

Directed by Luigi Comencini, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Louis Trintignant, Aldo Reggiani, Maria Teresa Albani, Italy/France, 1975, 105’

A flashback introduces the audience to the architect Garrone, a middle-aged man whose career is marked by failure and whose life is guided by strong sexual passions. We see him leaning against the balustrade of a balcony in the Galleria Subalpina, the same location Dario Argento had used a few years earlier in his movie Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This is one of the places where Garrone tries (rather unsuccessfully) to make contact with Turin’s affluent society. This side of Turin is the fulcrum of intrigue and crime in the film based on the novel by the same name, written by Fruttero and Lucentini. In the early 1990s, the novel’s sequel, A che punto è la notte, inspired a miniseries starring, once again, Marcello Mastroianni.

The Sunday Woman is one of the movies with the most locations set in Turin. A crucial sequence in the story takes place at the Balon, the city’s well-known flea market: on a busy Saturday morning, it becomes the meeting point of virtually all the characters, who will later be conducted to police headquarters for a sort of “showdown.” Other movie locations are Corso Galileo Ferraris and the Gallery of Modern Art, Piazza Carlo Alberto, Piazza Palazzo di Città, Via Pietro Micca, Via Bellezia, Via Lascaris, Via Bricherasio and Villa d’Agliè.