Portrait de province en rouge

I have only been able to view AL PIACERE DI RIVEDERLA in untranslated Italian, so the densely-plotted movie remains obscure to me -hopefully someone will review it who speaks the language.

When it was made the working title translated roughly as PORTRAIT OF A PROVINCE IN RED, taken from the Paolo Levi novel of that name. Ugo Tognazzi is a police commissioner investigating odd goings on in the sticks, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the action.

Biggest mystery here is the failed feature film career of director Marco Leto. When I saw his debut movie BLACK HOLIDAY theatrically in NYC in 1974, Leto was generally tabbed as the Next Big Thing in Italian cinema, but after this second film he was largely banished back to TV. I see several late '80s movies listed for him in IMDb with big-name casts, but they were RAI-backed productions and none of them were exported.

Leto has an offbeat (and off-kilter) approach to story telling, and in PROVINCE IN RED it results in many cryptic and oddball scenes, particularly a segment where a young burglar rapes a woman, tangential to the plot.

This was a co-production and both leading ladies are French for that reason (playing Italian roles): Francoise Fabian cast against type as sexy (even appearing topless) and Miou-Miou as her usual '70s free spirit -latter-day fans should catch up on her terrific work during that decade for such greats as Bertrand Blier, Marco Bellocchio, Alain Tanner and Joe Losey.