The fact that Paul Frees seems to do all the men's voices except for Marcello Mastroianni's and Giancarlo Giannini's seems to add a certain sameness to all the other men in the dubbed version of this film. Mastroianni is a communist bricklayer in love with Monica Vitti and she with him. He's best friends with Giannini, a Communist pizza maker, who's in love with Monica Vitti and she with him. It's like a dirty joke about them commies, they share everything. Except being human, they can't. It drives everyone crazy and the movie is very funny.
There seems to be enormous amounts of real subtextual commentary lost in translation. Mastroianni has his middle left finger in a sling throughout the movie, and is occasionally found on trash heaps. Given that his character's name is "Oreste" I think there's a reference to the classical legend, but it's not the Homeric, Pindaric, Sophoclean versions, but the bogus Robert Graves Year-King, fighting over Monica Vitti. Mastroianni does have flies buzzing around him a lot, indicating he's the Old King.
Given three screenwriters, including Age and Scarpelli, and Ettore Scola directing (he had given Vitti her first screen role almost two decades earlier), there is obviously a lot in this movie that is both precisely of its time and of its place, ill suited to the sort of random translation that an Italian sex comedy got in the 1970s. Unless someone is willing to go back and do a more careful translation, there's little more than a funny and bizarre comedy here. However it certainly is that.
