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Wifemistress is several shades less solemn. Its structure in fact is that of a sex farce, though its tone is more appropriate to a sentimental comedy. The disparity may arise because Director Marco Vicario (Homo Eroticus) can't quite manage the French trick of finding cuckoldry hilarious. The situation, at any rate, is satisfactorily ridiculous. Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a wealthy wine merchant, an idealist and a writer of tracts on the equality of women. He is also a great philanderer, with mistresses and bastard children all around Italy. But what has that to do with idealism?
When he is wrongly suspected of murder, he hides from the police in a loft across the street from his own mansion.
Through a crack in a shutter, he can look directly into the bedroom of his wife Antonia, a lovely, pale, sexless creature (Antonelli again) who suffers from hysterical paralysis. What does he see? Antonia bounds out of bed and, thinking that her husband is dead, bravely undertakes to continue his wine business. As she does this, she discovers both his idealism and his mistresses, neither of which she knew of before. She takes up sex and pamphleteering, and soon, under Luigi's flabbergasted eyes, is rolling about with an as sortment of lovers, male and female.
This is amusing, but not howlingly funny. A couple of reasons suggest themselves. One is that Antonelli has none of the fire in her eyes that might be expected of a revenge-bound wife in a farce. She plays her scenes as if they were high drama. Another is that Mastroianni, though not quite so sober, lets us see too much of the pain that an actual man would feel under such circumstances.
Even so, Wifemistress is thoroughly likable. The exterior photography is magnificent. The sex scenes are both tasteful and warmly sensual, as is not always the case with flicks whose directors feel obliged to show a little skin. A note here about skin: as a woman viewer of both these films justly and aggrievedly noted, "They always show more of her than they do of him." The double stan dard marches on.
— John Skow