Nostalgia Kinky

A strange and strangely effective Italian melodrama from prolific actor-turned-director Enrico Maria Salerno, Eutanasia di un amore (Break Up) is a deeply felt romance. Starring the powerful Ornella Muti and great character actor, sometime lead man Tony Musante, Break Up, based on a novel by Giorgio Saviane, with a script by Salerno and a slew of other writers, has a fairly simple plot.
After his long-time love abandons him without explanation, Paolo becomes obsessed with both finding out why she left and getting her back.

I’ve been there, Paolo.
Buddy,
I’ve been there.

The novel Eutanasia di un amore muti was a big hit in Italy upon its release in 1977. It went on to win the prestigious literary award, the Bancarella Prize. With the novel’s success, it was no surprise the film community immediately swept in. The property finally landed as an Italian co-production between the independent companies, Koral Cinematografica and Capital Film.

Break Up is the final film Salerno directed. His brief career in the director’s seat produced only four films, with the most well-known being another Tony Musante drama The Anonymous Venetian. Salerno, just past the age of forty, had many more films to make as an actor, but Break Up represents, well, his official breakup with that director’s chair.

As for Salerno’s direction? It’s solid if a bit meandering at times. A lot of Break Up consists of Musante following and watching Muti, as he and the audience try to understand her motivation for leaving. Salerno doesn’t try to do too much behind the camera, and that works well for this rather somber film. Famed editor Mario Morra gets to put together a couple of those romantic montages that only seventies cinema seemed to get right, and I bet Marcello Gatti’s cinematography looks positively swell. Sadly, the only version I could find was a fairly dingy-looking standard-definition sourced copy.

It is no surprise that the peerless Ornella Muti is the highlight of the film. Despite her top billing, she has less screen time than Mustante, who appears in nearly every scene, but Muti is positively riveting, haunting the film, much the same way her character haunts Musante. Muti’s always been my pick as the greatest Italian actress of her generation, and she easily controls every moment of the film she’s in, often with little to no dialogue. Glancing at Muti’s impressive filmography during this period, it is a bit easy to see how Break Up has been a bit lost to time, but she’s divine here and extremely moving.

Musante is good here as well. I must admit I am a bit of a sucker for these ‘men haunted by lost love’ roles, and Musante plays this uniquely intense pain very well. Break Up might have been better served by a perhaps more traditionally charismatic leading man, but Musante is still memorable.

Break Up is perhaps a fairly insignificant film, but I miss these sorts of sincere, unapologetic, weepy-eyed romances. Salerno didn’t necessarily make a great film with Break Up, but it is an incredibly sincere one, a film that truly wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s hard to imagine anyone watching Ornella Muti, at her most poetic, set to Daniele Patucchi’s sublimely lush score not at least slightly tearing up.

Musante morphed into a successful character actor in the wake of Break Up, and Muti continued as one of the great and most interesting actors on the planet. Break Up didn’t make a huge impression, but her films immediately following with directors Dino Risi and then Sergio Corbucci certainly did. To my knowledge, Break Up has only been released in Italy and Germany on VHS and DVD. The copy I found, with custom English subs, is on YouTube. This rather grimy-looking print certainly isn’t the ideal way to see this minor Ornella Muti classic, but it’ll do.

-Jeremy Richey, September 2026-