Directed by: Pasquale Festa Campanile
Stars: Johnny Dorelli, Barbara Bouchet, Carlo Bagno, Elsa Vazzoler, Anny Papa, Stefania Casini
Language: Italian | Subtitles: English
Country: Italy | Imdb Info
Also known as: Come perdere una moglie e trovare un’amante
Description: Alberto Castelli is a successful advertising executive whose respectable life collapses in a single afternoon. After a minor car accident with Eleonora Rubens, a beautiful Dutch woman abandoned by her husband, Alberto returns home early and discovers his own wife in a compromising situation with the plumber.
Humiliated, furious, and suddenly convinced that his life is over, Alberto seeks help from a psychoanalyst. By coincidence, Eleonora is also suffering from romantic disaster and consults the same doctor. The prescription for both is simple: leave the city, clear the mind, and spend some time in the mountains.
Naturally, they are sent to the same remote Alpine inn.
At first, neither recognizes the other as the stranger from the car accident. Alberto arrives bruised by betrayal and determined to recover his dignity, while Eleonora is trying to escape her own heartbreak. But the mountain retreat quickly becomes a farcical trap of grappa, flooded rooms, mistaken beds, jealous confusion, and increasingly absurd attempts at explanation.
Every step Alberto takes to behave like a wounded gentleman somehow makes him look worse. Eleonora, meanwhile, is forced to decide whether he is an unbearable fool, an unlucky victim, or perhaps the one man whose disasters match her own. By the time skiing accidents, rescue teams, and a wildly inappropriate priest enter the picture, their shared misery has transformed into something dangerously close to romance.
How to Lose a Wife and Find a Lover is classic late-70s Italian sex comedy: light, chaotic, shamelessly broad, and built around the idea that adultery, therapy, vacation lodges, and bad timing can all become ingredients in the same romantic catastrophe.
Legacy Note:
Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile, How to Lose a Wife and Find a Lover belongs to the tradition of commedia sexy all’italiana, where marital crisis and erotic confusion are filtered through slapstick, social embarrassment, and farcical coincidence. The film pairs Johnny Dorelli’s nervous comic timing with Barbara Bouchet’s cool glamour, turning infidelity into a series of increasingly ridiculous Alpine accidents.
The result is not a cynical breakup comedy but a playful fantasy of romantic reset: two betrayed people lose their old lives through humiliation, only to stumble — literally and repeatedly — into a new one. With its mountain setting, bedroom mix-ups, psychoanalytic jokes, and outrageous final misunderstanding, it remains a breezy example of Italian popular comedy at the end of the 1970s, when desire, divorce, and absurdity were often treated as part of the same holiday package.
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