Amanti

... is a rather odd and thankless task. I never dreamt of thinking about the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni without using the highest of praise, but this uninteresting, plodding 1969 film provided me with a chance to do so.

This film is proof that the unthinkable, what we judge to be impossible and beyond imagination, can happen.

Dunaway is Julia, a peculiar, to say the least, american woman who makes a living out of designing gowns, who has an affair with Valerio, a married italian engineer working on the development of the airbag.

They're rich, they're glamorous, they're beautiful, they're in love... nothing could part them. Except Julia is suffering from a terminal illness, and is bound to die in a matter of days.

Sticking to the basic rules of screenwriting as I know them, this movie is irritatingly plodding. We only discover that Julia is dying towards the end, and we never know whose is the main dilemma - Julia's or Valerio's. Should they stick together and face bravely Julia's last days on Earth? is the main query, I guess. The only problem is that this query, this dilemma, is presented to the audience in the last twenty minutes of film, and resolved - better yet, unresolved - in the last five. The other 70 minutes or so of film are spent as they stay together and play amusing little games with each other. A time in which the five writers of the film could easily delve into their main characters psyches - if anything else - is wasted. Julia's just plain weird and depressed, and Valerio seems terribly cold and unfeeling.

It also clearly aspires to be profound. It aims at being something lyric, but, trapped inside it's own pretentious attitude, it becomes a schmaltzy tearjerker.

The acting is not bad at all, though. But the script provides Dunaway and Mastroianni with little chance to showcase their many talents. Also, the set designs are gorgeous, as mentioned by the first reviewer, and the soundtrack is lovely. The title song, written by Manuel De Sica - hail, nepotism! - is sung by none other than Ella Fitzgerald.

Well, all in all, this movie is a bizarre one, but it is worth viewing nevertheless, mainly as existing proof that nothing - I mean, nothing - is impossible. :)

To be honest, I am a fan of this type of Italian movie and I have been to the Villa in outside of florence where the opening was shot.There is a certain feeling for this type of Late 60's Italian movie that one has to feel good about. I adored the soundtrack and If anyone know of any disk that "Ella" sang that title song, Please let me know

Italian upper class environment in the 1960's: beautiful houses and interiors, women of course also and so well dressed but, as in Dolce Vita, bored and wont to indulge in ambiguous erotic games - exciting for some and decadent for others. Mastroianni and Dunaway meet in such a venue before the evening festivities begin and fall in love and escape to the mountains at Cortina. The director Vittorio De Sica keeps the film viewer at a distance by introducing a "third party", the breathtakingly beautiful mountain scenery. Intense love and imminent death of one of the lovers is not an unusual story. Through the beautiful photography, the cool and tight directing of De Sica, one senses that the dangerous mountains will provide the ending. The acting does not drag you in willy-nilly to experience ardently the emotions but leaves you to decide how you would have acted in such a tragedy. Some might agree with the American critic Maltin who found it pseudo romantic slop, others with a European sensitivity may decide like the lovers or remain ambiguous, but definitely not unmoved by their own thinking and their own feelings.

This is an excellent movie. To focus only on whether Ms. Dunaway is able or not to "warm" (whatever that means) is pointless. Vittorio DeSicca provides an admirable portrait of late 60s Italy, and more broadly of the kind of moral tensions going on during the late 60s worldwide. Marcelo Mastroianni was playing pretty much himself on the screen, while Faye Dunaway is on the other extreme of her rendition of Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde, frail, ill, sad. To my mind this movie is a jewel of the Italian masters. The Italian cinema will later overplay these kinds of extreme situations of ailing lovers confronted with an awful fate, as in Anonimo Venezziano, and many others in the early 1970s, but Amanti stands on its own, not only because of the beautiful cinematography (the Alps and Italy at large), but also because of Ms. Dunaway rendition of the character.

Love made Faye Dunaway an exquisitely beautiful woman. She and her costar of A Place for Lovers, Marcello Mastroianni, had a years-long affair during and after the filming. While this is a love story, and you could argue that she was merely acting, we've seen her in other love stories. She's never looked at anyone the way she looked at Marcello. Although Faye endured great pain, you can clearly see from this film that her love ran very deep. This was one of the rare performances of her career that wasn't a "Faye Dunaway performance." She wasn't cool, collected, and reserved. She was warm, vulnerable, and wearing her heart on her sleeve. Was her Chinatown typecast all a façade? Could she have had a completely different career if she were allowed to take on more roles like this and Hurry Sundown, her film debut from the previous year?

The plot of this film is extremely similar to 1977's Bobby Deerfield, but I've never read that the latter was a direct remake. Perhaps it was a coincidence, or, like when Buono Sera, Mrs. Campbell got turned into Mamma Mia!, the original never got credit. Marcello is a racecar driver, and Faye is terminally ill. She summons him to her chalet for a brief affair without telling him why she wants one last chance at passion or why it has to be cut short. Obviously, this is a tearjerker, and all the more so when you watch it now, knowing that Marcello didn't leave his wife in real life and run off with Faye. They certainly make a beautiful couple, and it just goes to show you that love can transform a person's appearance. In the following year's The Arrangement, Faye was paired with Kirk Douglas, whom she couldn't care less about. It was one of those detached performances, and she didn't look very attractive. In A Place for Lovers, she looked downright beautiful.