El inocente

The languid pace of Visconti's last film is not a problem for me. He was an old man, directing from a wheelchair, and had slowed down a lot. Think of it as the long slow movement of a symphony by Mahler - whose music, you will remember, he used in Death in Venice - and it will make more sense.

What I want to know is more about Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel. One commentator claims that the male lead is a kind of 'atheistic hero' faithful to his beliefs, and that Visconti subverts the author's intention by showing him as a rich aristocrat as selfish as he is unpleasant. Can any authority on Italian literature shed any light?

In the Nineteenth Century, in Italy, the atheist and aristocrat Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) is married with Giuliana Hermil (Laura Antonelli) and has a paramour, Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O'Neill). He decides to leave his wife and to stay with Teresa, but after a period, she dispenses with him. Tullio comes back to his wife, but she had an affair with a writer, friend of his brother, and is pregnant. Tullio asks Giuliana to make an abort, but she refuses. When the child is born, Tullio hates him, but Giuliana tries to protect the baby. In the end, a tragedy happens. This movie is an intense drama, and certainly not indicated for a general public. The cast has an outstanding performance under the magnificent direction of Luchino Visconti. The movie shows also a wonderful and very detailed reconstitution of the Italian aristocracy in the Nineteenth Century. The very sad story does not bring redemption to any character. In Brazil, it is only available on VHS, but it deserves to be offered to the viewers by the distributors on DVD, to highlight the beauty of the scenes. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): `O Inocente' (`The Innocent')

Could we qualify a movie as Ardent? I think so, at least I do when remembering this film. Maybe it's because of the smoldering story it tells, maybe because of the passionate characters temperament, maybe because of the gleaming beauty of the surroundings, the extremely luxurious interiors of upper class old noblesse, with their incredibly gorgeous 'Fin de Siecle' gowns and jewels and objects and music... What a superb film!

Jennifer O'Neil devastatingly beautiful and seductive as the self-assured, selfish, spoiled, ambitious, self-seeking lover, as much as Laura Antonelli as the opposite side of the coin but in a lower key, as the humble and insecure, betrayed, embittered, resentful wife, but also devastatingly gorgeous. And Giancarlo Giannini, holder of the most beautiful male green eyes ever shown on a close up, and adding to that his fantastically sensuous voice.

We end up watching this ultra-refined European product that only a Visconti and very few other directors (Kubrick with "Barry Lindon") could have had the exquisiteness of taste to produce.

The libretto is first rate and overwhelming in its slow development (and that makes almost unbearable the unpredictable climax) leaving us almost as devastated as its female protagonist, when she walks away while an early dawn starts defining the outline of the magnificent garden surrounding that incredibly perfect building where life had just ceased to exist.

Luchino Visconti is one of my favorite directors. I think Death in Venice is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. This film begins with the credits shown over a book with its pages being turned by a hand reminding me of Jeanne Cocteau's beginning for Beauty and the Beast (1946). Tullio (Giancarlo Gianni) is an aristocrat married to Laura Antonelli but he fools around shamelessly with Jennifer O'Neil. He's a bullshit artist at high speed, but one day he gets his come-uppance. He seems not to care about Antonelli's feelings, and one day she cheats on him with a novelist/writer. She is left pregnant, and Tullio is devastated. He cannot accept the child (who all thinks is his own). Visconti's films always have a certain disdain for rich people, and here his contempt is risen to art while telling a very engaging story. Gianni's performance is powerful stuff, while Antonelli is both beautiful and sad in equal measures. Not as good as Death in Venice but excellent nonetheless.

Visconti's final film is a brutally beautiful masterpiece. As ever, the film is fetishistic in its attention to detail (witness the scene in which the two leads are having sex and the camera spends ages examining Luara Antonelli's exquisite shoes, bodice and stockings).

Giancarlo Giannini and Antonelli play a married couple whose pleasure and displeasure at each other's extramarital affairs border on the masochistic.

Giannini, the macho man whose personal moral code allows him not only to take a lover but to tell his wife in great detail about his lustings for his lover, is terrifying as the husband unable to choose between his wife and his lover, hurting both and eventually pleasing neither. But it is often overlooked that Antonelli, whose acting roles prior to 'L'innocente', featured such greats as 'Dr. Goldfoot and the Sex Bombs' and 'The Eroticist', startles as a woman who, although on first glance is 'more sinned against than sinning' but is equally manipulative and sadistic in her relationship with her husband, toying with him as he furiously attempts to make her admit to her indiscretions.