Senso

Opens with a lush rendition of Il Trovatore at Teatro La Fenice, SENSO is an ostentatious melodrama imprinted with Visconti's pronounced blue blood opulence, retells an Italian countess' (Valli) vain and poignant attempt to pursue her one-sided affection to an Austrian officer (Granger shines in the rich Technicolor palette as an Adonis), whose misogyny and promiscuity will cause his own doom and mar her mentality up to the hilt.

The film sets its time during the fall of Austrian occupation in Venezia 1866, Valli is wavering between her bureaucratic husband (Moog) and rioting cousin (Girotti), to break loose from the stalemate, she irrevocably falls for a young lieutenant in the opponent camp, but he is no knight in shining armor but a foul and spineless scoundrel with irresistible sheen of deadly charm. Granger's gorgeous lover-boy image is a quintessential smokescreen to veil his despicable innards, but after all, it is a consensual deal despite of Valli's false hope, more significantly its anti-war signals have been forcibly cast by Granger's self-abandonment and the lousy war battlefield experienced by Girotti, which, more plausibly it is an intentional move by Visconti, a distraction from the central turmoil, but done with a tinge of amateurish fecklessness.

Valle shoulders on a profound effort to scrutinize a woman's inscrutable sexual desire which being repressed for too long, both she and Granger align themselves with Visconti's brimful-of- emotion style (again, thanks to Techincolor and the overstuffed score as well) which approximate the OTT threshold in certain degree, although falling out with Visconti eventually, Granger succeeds in bringing about his best screen persona and it was such a great era when a gay man can play an outright straight womanizer on the celluloid.

On the one hand SENSO fails to impress me as my favorite among Visconti's work of art, and scale-wise pales by comparison with LUDWIG (1972, 8/10) and THE LEOPARD (1963, 8/10), but on the other hand, only Visconti can flaunt such an overbearing melodrama with true mettle and without any compromise, a trend-setter would inspire later kindred spirits, for instance Baz Luhrmann's 3D adaption of the bourgeois sumptuosity THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, 8/10).

Whatever Anton Bruckner had in mind when writing his majestic Seventh Symphony, it probably wasn't as the score to a postwar Italian love story set during the Italian-Austrian conflicts of the Risorgiamento. Though the use of pre-existing classical music as backdrop for films is to be discouraged, here it works in surprising ways. Alida Valli is the Countess Livia Serpieri, in a loveless marriage to an older, collaborationist official. At the opera (Venice's La Fenice during Il Trovatore!) she meets up with a dashing young Austrian officer, Farley Granger. (Digression: After a handful of American films -- They Live by Night, Rope, Side Street, Strangers on a Train -- Granger journeyed to Italy to work with Visconti then fell off the screen for years, only to resurface in a few schlock films in the late 60s and early 70s. What happened to him?) They kindle up a clandestine and dangerous affair -- the wealthy older woman and the manipulative wastrel. After wheedling a small fortune out of her to bribe a doctor who declares him unfit to serve, he dumps her. But hell hath no fury....Luchino Visconti, assisted by the young Franco Zeffirelli -- both were opera directors, too -- pulls out all the stops, ending with a finale reminiscent of Tosca (but with a twist). Senso is a shameless and unforgettable wallow in Italianate passion -- unabashed verismo translated to the silver screen.

It's no coincidence that the film opens at the opera. In some fine deep shots we are introduced to our characters with the performance in the background - no doubt to establish the stylistic connection. So Visconti, and collaborator Franco Zefferelli, wanted to make an opera without the singing. This gives us grandeur, but rigidity, and even the mini riot that takes place in the opera house at the outset is aesthetically stylised. You need to buy into the approach at this point, and I simply didn't. It just seemed like a bad idea. Opera is a stage spectacle, all about grand gesture, posturing, formality; it cannot transmit subtleties, the format doesn't allow it. Take away the music and you are left with a banal story and a lot of fancy costumery. For Visconti, constantly wanting to remind us of his noble descent, that is enough - his main concern is showing us lavish interior decor, an obsession you'll find either stirring or stifling. For music we get Bruckner, whose indecisive, meandering drone is largely ignorable.

Cinematically, the result is half-baked. Valli walks into a room full of Austrian soldiers. David Lean (who I equate with Visconti to some extent) would have made a significant scene out of this but Visconti just gives us soldiers draped around the place in various unnatural postures, as you might expect. One of them moves and strikes up a different posture – as you might expect. It's all cut and pasted from the Manual of Things Seen and Done Before. The camera stays back, wide angle, and doesn't lend much of a hand with the narrative, leaving the players to communicate with exaggerated gesture.

A married Venetian countess falls for a young Austrian army officer - we know from the first scene that he is an utter cad, but she doesn't – or rather she does, but being a one dimensional clinging woman she is bound to hurl herself into disastrous folly. Hence the film mainly consists of Valli ringing the emotional changes over her illicit affair. Visconti indulged so much time in this that he must have thought he was dealing with an original topic. Along the way, there's the approaching end of Austrian rule of northern Italy and some slight comment on the collaboration of senior Venetian figures – but that point seems hardly worth making after all this time. There is a lengthy section where Valli's cousin (dashing hero figure) rushes on a military errand rather ridiculously right across the battle line of two approaching armies, but this section was apparently heavily edited, rendering it pointless and incomprehensible. The battle scenes are childish – a puff of smoke and the nearest two soldiers fall to the ground – this happens repeatedly.

The script can't do anything with the stereotypical characters and the one-sentence plot and there are no stand-out lines. This is extraordinary considering the 'English dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles'. Probably it was there but smothered by Visconti's operatic technique. One wonders why these writers were attracted to the project (apart from a free holiday in Rome) – perhaps they liked the final humiliation of the countess, which is quite harsh – even gleefully misogynistic. She gets her own back though, and it seems the moral is that both men and woman, with their impulsive need for each other, no matter how noble the exterior, are stupid, weak and mutually self-destructive. That ridicules everybody (...or does it?).

Funnily enough, the main problem is Alida Valli, who is required to over-emote in every scene (in total contrast to her depressive role in "The Third Man") – it's a little unpleasant to watch and she soon begins to annoy. She doesn't look right at all during the romance – too hard-edged. Farley Granger was actually the main point of interest. His slight woodenness suits the impossibly white uniform and cape he was made to wear (what sort of wash-powder did they have in those days?), and in the climactic drunken scene (enhanced by a delightful whore - the highlight of the film) he did as well as anyone could have done under a direction that demanded over-amplification of every attempted nuance. And his eyes expressed something beyond the paltry plot of the film as if betraying that this Italian job was an odd, intense experience for him for one reason or another. So, for all the film's grandeur, all I was left with was some vague speculation of a personal nature about one of its players. Perhaps his story – relating to the real world - is the film Visconti should have made.

Italy is still probably in ruins of war at this point, real or figurative, so what does this filmmaker do, Visconti? By waving his wand, he conjures up an earlier Italy, also in the throes of occupation and war, it's the last days of the Austrian occupation around Venice, but now it can all be placed in the safer distance of history, set up as operatic melodrama on a stage.

You'll see this self-referential waving of the hand in the just the opening scene. We open in an opera house in the middle of a play, with actors on stage valiantly rushing to weapons. As soon as the play is over, patriot viewers rain the place down with revolutionary pamphlets.

It is an operatic play that we see; film as opera. Up on this stage, collaboration with a regime can be safely contained in a love affair, rich countess falling for the dashing Austrian lieutenant. In the usual melodramatic passion, she risks all. The whole point of the story is to have moments like when news reach her of a battle won against the Austrians, but instead of rejoicing at liberation, she must look terrified because her beau might have been on that battlefield.

It's not something I can get excited about, nor would I recommend you go out of your way to find it, except as contrast to other, more pertinent things about how a viewer can be choreographed through space. I mean, here is a cinema of vistas and gestures. When a camera pans around a room that someone walks in, it's just this room that we see. War is suddenly introduced as a series of vistas with crowds rushing about, filmed in a disjointed way in order to convey chaos and mobilization and yet they manage to look placid and painterly.

But how about this? It ends with another self-referential note but now one that waves away illusion, dispels fiction. Having risked all, she finds out he's not the dashing hero of operas that she wanted him to be.

Up on this stage, turning your back on your countrymen is only the innocent fallout of passion, all because you maybe yearned for some of the romance of stories from the past.

Wonderful movie, and quite unexpected at the time from the neorealist Visconti, finally letting some of the operatic juice flow into his film work. It's also the first of his explorations of Italian history and social change, to be followed by The Leopard and the fantastic Rocco and His Brothers.

One caveat: At a screening a couple of years ago at MoMA, I learned that it was the Italian government that was responsible for the snipping of some crucial scenes near the end of Senso, depicting the Battle of Custozza. These were meant to make his critique of the Italian ruling classes and their failure to pull together during this period of the risorgimento more explicit. But apparently the Italian government, fresh from defeat in WW II, didn't like the idea of a major movie showing an Italian army being beaten. So the episode was truncated, leaving a few people scratching their heads about what the point of it all was. Poor Visconti tended to make long movies, and often had trouble getting them shown at the proper length in the US, but this time it was his own government that stymied him!

As for the rest: Granger is fine, but it's Valli who gives one of the all-time great move star performances. What a great face! The story is written on it, and the director wisely keeps her the focus of attention.