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A beginning entirely from the pen of Hollywood, with a Hollywood star and Hollywood sounds. Take a look at this Faye Dunaway if you want to know what was being talked about, or better still raved about, at the time. In terms of content, however, we are not in the American New World, but in old Italy and the director is also an old Italian. A late work for Vittorio De Sica and obviously another cinematic experiment. Neorealism meets New Hollywood? Not at all, most likely contemporary European. A dramatic romance, at least on paper, but in its realisation it's quite offbeat. Enter Marcelo Mastroianni, the contrast is complete. In the course of the film, the viewer is certainly also confused. No wonder with such an inconsistent tone. Love. Illness. Happiness. Misfortune. Hope, so far, so good. But then there's jazz droning, loads of bizarre scenes, overacting and, despite the exaggerated emotions, somehow undercooled melancholy. To the point, it gets silly in places and consistently erratic, which can be seen as a warning or a promise, depending on your expectations. You should leave them where they are anyway and just try to let the special atmosphere, the great images and the two icons work their magic. Dunaway and Mastroianni don't go together? Apparently they do, in real life they had an affair, one alongside their marriage. And in the film, well, one looks good, one plays well, in a way a complement. The chemistry was right, see the aforementioned gossip. I'm noticeably not quite as critical of the film as the public was at the time, because I could feel what I was seeing, not something special, but unusual, somehow intoxicating. I also really wanted to know how this hot-blooded love would end, or not. An interest in the film that the film first has to create.

... 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. :)

Before I began writing my review, I read through Moonspinner55's and noticed that although they seemed to have this film pegged, they sure have a lot of 'not helpfuls'. While this sort of thing is very common, it's sad--as their review very nicely summed up this film.

Faye Dunaway's performance was reminiscent of a zombie--a well-coiffed, bejeweled and heavy false eyelashed zombie. And I really don't so much blame her but the terrible script and the wrong direction by a very talented director...Vittoria De Sica. Perhaps this film is why after her huge success in "Bonnie and Clyde" her career just kind of fizzled.

Let's talk about De Sica just a bit. He is one of my favorite directors--directing such masterpieces as "The Children Are Watching Us" (I'd put this in my Top 10 of best films ever), "Miracle in Milan" and "Umberto D". However, the sort of films he directed brilliantly had some things in common--and are so completely unlike "A Place For Lovers" and other De Sica miscues (such as "Indiscretion of an American Wife"). His best works are of the Italian Neo-Realistic style--using non-actors in the roles and emphasizing the 'everyman' approach to the problems in the film. In other words, real people in real situations. However, when it came to the glossy love stories, this brilliant director was cold, impersonal and pretty dreadful at times. He just didn't seem to know how to use these people in love stories. Yet, with famed Sophia Loren in a non-love story, he created the brilliant "Two Women". Love stories with big-name casts he just seemed ill-suited--though as an actor he did fine in such films (and appeared in about 150 films).

Here in "A Place for Lovers", the film is wooden--unemotional and disconnected. This is odd, as the film is about a dying woman--yet you really could care less for her. She is unlikable and stiff. A better script surely would have helped, but giving his actress the suggestion to smile would have helped even more! I loved the director, but here he is way out of his comfort zone.

As a result of a bad story, bad direction and lifeless characters (though Marcello Mastroiani isn't too bad), the film is painfully dull and not worth your time---UNLESS. That is unless you are a nut like me who LIKES seeing bad films on occasion. In fact, this movie is number 47 on my quest to see all 50 of the films featured in Harry Medved's brilliant "The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time". While I don't always agree with all of his choices, as a teenager he was able to compile the list and write an amazingly funny and clever book--long before anyone thought to come up with bad movie lists or suggest actually TRYING to see bad films. I am not sure I'd have included "A Place For Lovers", though if you are trying to list a movie from either the worst romance or worst illness categories, it sure is a reasonable choice!

If you care about such an odd quest, I have just obtained the final three films from this list and anticipate soon reviewing "King Richard and the Crusaders", "North West Mounted Police" and "Daughter of the Jungle"--then my bizarre and twisted hobby will be at an end. Then, it's off on some other bizarre and twisted quest!! Happy viewing, folks.

First, O.K., this film is a guilty pleasure. So I'm an inveterate romantic. So kill me.

There is one scene when Faye says to Marcello, "I don't want your pity." He responds by saying, increasingly heatedly, "Pity? PITY? WHAT pity?" Then he throws her down on the ground and kisses her, saying, "I LOVE you! I LOVE you! I LOVE you!" Now, c'mon. If you're a romantic (and you probably aren't), you'll adore this scene. Others will become nauseous. So sorry.

Sometimes a girl has to have her fantasies. Apologies to all you realists and intellectual cinemaphiles.

I remember watching this film on the late, late, late show during the early 1980's. I suffered from insomnia and still do. But when this movie was over, I slept soundly. In fact, I had a hard time staying awake. This just might be the most boring movie I've ever seen. Perhaps the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor opus "Boom!" is more dull, but don't waste your life comparing notes! Faye Dunaway as a fashion designer with incurable movie disease and Marcello Mastroianni as the engineer who gives her one last fling on her way to the cemetery deliver sleepwalking performances. There is some comic relief with the musical score, which is so overwrought, it made me chuckle during some of the dramatic highlights. Whoever gave this film a positive review must have been bribed to do it.

Before I read her telling autobiography, I didn't sense much about Faye Dunaway that was either grounded or warm. Of course she's a first-rate actress, but she's also an aloof one (most of the time she could be acting in front of the mirror). Her performance in "A Place For Lovers" (the US title) is no different. She never connects with the viewer and spends the entire time staring at Marcello Mastroianni's collar (these two did have an off-camera affair--go figure!). The romantic set-up: he's a married Italian, she's an American businesswoman in poor health. She also harbors a peculiar death wish for the both of them. This is an odd, unaffecting picture only worth-watching out of curiosity, but it won't thrill anyone--particularly fans of Dunaway, who floats by in a whiff of chiffon, with impossibly blonde hair and impossibly thick eyelashes. * from ****

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.

One of the biggest disasters ever to be perpetrated by a major film-maker, Vittorio de Sica's "Amanti" ("A Place for Lovers") is a wheezy romance involving Faye Dunaway -- as an ultra-glam fashion designer -- and Marcello Mastroianni -- as a married man who has an affair with Faye, not realizing that she's dying from one of those mysterious Hollywood Starlet terminal diseases. The production design is fabulous, but the acting and the script are not to be believed.

I am so lucky and happy to finally have seen this rare film!!!! It's been released on DVD in Sweden!!!! It's been impossible to see this film. Has it been shown anywhere since its initial release in 1968?

The film was in that infamous book "50 Worst Films" by the Medved brothers. It's not bad at all, quite gripping actually if you like tragic romance on film. It's well made with good direction by de Sica and good acting by Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni.

It IS very much a European film from the 1960's. A bit too trendy for most and that means people will think it is dated. It's a nice document of its time. I do wonder why it wasn't a hit back then, since the film has two big stars and a well known director. Perhaps it's too stilted. I am a great Faye Dunaway fan so for me it was a HUGE pleasure to see this film. I also LOVE films from the sixties high on style.

It's strange that the plot is very similar to the huge hit Love Story from 1970, yet Amanti is completely forgotten. Maybe the story of two jetset people in luxurious environments became a bit tired after a while. The plot is rather thin with very little background explanation. The film also borrows a lot of elements from other films: two beautiful adults in a love affair (A Man and a Woman), a woman seeing shocking news on TV (Persona), beautiful decadent rich people (La Dolce Vita), rich people stealing in a shop (Breakfast at Tiffany's)...

Faye also reminds me of Monica Vitti walking around full of stylish angst in Antonioni movies. (Nothing wrong with that!) She even acts kooky like Vitti in some scenes! It's lovely to see Faye so relaxed on the screen. She seems to be genuinely enjoying herself and is absolutely luminous. Maybe it's because she fell in love with Marcello during filming. She gives a very sensitive performance as Julie.

With a disjointed story and performances that are nearly devoid of emotion, this film could not hold my interest for more than twenty minutes. If the characters were likable, I might have been drawn into the film, but they are detached and they reveal no motivations. There are so many films more worthy of watching.

One of those late, very sensitive and poignant Vittorio de Sica films, concentrating entirely on a personal relationship. I always regarded Faye Dunaway as one of the most beautiful actresses ever, but here she surpasses herself both in beauty and acting. Mastroianni is always reliable and original, and he actually matches Faye Dunaway more than well, although this is not Sofia Loren. There are two additional factors making this film extra remarkable, the fact that the script writer is Cesare Zavattini, who wrote all of de Sica's best films, and the overwhelmingly beautiful music by Manuel de Sica, his son, I suppose, that veils the film in a silken bandage of urgent soothing beauty, just like in his last film "The Voyage" with Sofia Loren and Richard Burton. The locations are among the loveliest in north eastern Italy, by the coast north of Venice and in a central hill station in the Dolomites. The story might seem superficial at first, especially if you don't know anything and haven't read anything about it, as the casual relationship by hap doesn't seem to amount to anything special, but it does. The cars play a prominent part in this film, as Mastroianni manufactures car accident protections, and there are several risky car journeys. which eventually must lead to some concern. Also the end is typical of Vittorio de Sica - all has been said, and life will continue anyway whatever happens - even the greatest passions are only episodes, even though they sometimes are marked unforgettable by the circumstances.

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.

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