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I unwittingly watched The Pizza Triangle (1970) the night before its star, Monica Vitti, died at the age of 90. She’s rightfully being remembered the day I’m writing this as one of the all-time-great actresses — a mesmerizing performer who, with her stormy eyes and expressive Aphrodite-esque face, could convey a rich interiority seemingly no matter the character. Vitti has always been, and will continue to be, most associated with the four icy films she made with Michelangelo Antonioni in the 1960s — L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964) — wherein she gave devastating performances that also make her characters’ increasingly consuming misery seem a little bit chic. Great as she is in these movies, though, they’ve also put her in a kind of albatross of stylish depression in the average cinephile’s imagination. When looking beyond her collaborations with Antonioni, it’s not hard to notice just how broad a range she had. In The Pizza Triangle, a frenetic romantic farce, she especially flaunts how great she was at comedy, among the genres in which she worked most in her post-Antonioni years. 

The movie plays like a broad satire of romantic tragedies. In it, Vitti is Adelaide, a florist in love with two men and hopeless at figuring out which she likes better. There’s Oreste (Marcello Mastroianni), a bulldoggish, looks-like-he-smells-bad bricklayer-slash-radical communist she meets cute while he’s flopped in some rubble next to a swing carousel she’s been riding on all night with her buddies. (Adelaide tells Oreste right away that she feels like she knows him already: she saw him initially at a shooting gallery a while back, then has seen him passing her flower stand, and in the time since has been calling him “Fernando” to herself.) Oreste might be perfect to her eye if he weren’t married to a hellraiser not opposed to murdering in cold blood any woman with the gall to look at her husband longer than a few seconds. It’s no surprise when she puts Adelaide in the hospital mid-movie, so black and blue she can barely keep her pupils straight. Then, eventually, comes Oreste’s rakish best friend Nello (Giancarlo Giannini), a pizza maker with Prince Charming hazel eyes. He makes a move to steal Adelaide for himself by sending to her and Oreste’s table when they’re having dinner at his restaurant a heart-shaped pie.

When Adelaide begins an affair with Nello, it doesn’t remain secret for long. Oreste subsequently gets more dangerously jealous and possessive. He intellectualizes Adelaide’s treachery as a sort of class betrayal, then goes low enough to commit the crime of passion that sets the film’s plot into motion in the first place. (The Pizza Triangle begins with a trial where Oreste is being probed about said crime; the rest of the movie is ostensibly a long-winded flashback, with ingeniously placed fourth wall breaks throughout the film not aimed at the audience per se but the perplexed jury.) 

The movie’s main trio knows exactly what co-writer (with screenwriting duo Age & Scarpelli) and director Ettore Scola envisions with The Pizza Triangle. All give high-octane, funnily fake-serious performances. Vitti’s is best. She’s doing a pitched-up parody of the kind of anguished woman in love you’d see in a classic Hollywood-era movie: she’s doing something that feels like Lana Turner crashing into Jean Harlow. Her work has a loving tease to it that suggests she can play this type so well because she’s known, and adored, it for so long. It never teeters into glib sarcasm; she can sell it entirely when she emotionally asks Oreste to kill her in one scene so that she never has a chance to come down from the happiness she’s experiencing in that moment. 

Surprisingly, given how consistently funny and fast-paced The Pizza Triangle is (it even throws in a quick musical sequence), it doesn’t feel like whiplash when the inevitable tragedy forces a halt and is actually emotional. Everything is so heightened that the primitive ending is in keeping with the narrative audacity everywhere else. This is a winning movie that manages to have it both ways. It pokes fun at romantic-tragedy movies and gets easy laughs from the mockery. But it also knows — and clearly enjoys — their beats so well that it additionally works basically as effectively as a better-than-average one playing it straight.