Numa Noite... Um Jantar

An almost absurdly stylish piece of arty erotica, this Giuseppe Patroni Griffi film shows us glamorous people indulging in kinky sexual games, wearing hip 60s clothes and lounging about in chic Italian villas. What more could one ask out of life? As if to assure us, the callow public, that such wanton goings-on can lead only to a bad end, the script has one character intone solemnly into the camera: "I am obscenely and disgustingly happy. I am deformed and destroyed by my happiness." There are worse problems to be had.

The plot centres on a famous writer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who fantasises an affair between his wife (Florinda Bolkan) and his best friend, a bisexual actor (Tony Musante). Unbeknown to him, the pair have in fact been lovers for years. Not only that, they have drawn a third player into their bedroom games - an anarchist/poet/actor/gigolo (Lino Capolicchio) who squats in a dankly luxurious basement and makes love to Bolkan under a Nazi swastika flag.

Their menage a trois scene - mild enough by today's standards - made the film a scandalous success on its release. In fact, Patroni Griffi gets more erotic mileage from a shot of three clasped hands than Zalman King could get from a sea of naked, thrashing bodies. While his wife is thus engaged, Trintignant drifts into an affair with a rich but lonely single woman (Annie Girardot).

It's Trintignant and Girardot (unsurprisingly) who walk away with the acting honours. Musante and Capolicchio flare their nostrils and bat their eyes to signal their sexual ambiguity. The lovely Bolkan may not be able to act, but with those tiger eyes and Modigliani cheekbones, she hardly needs to. Her wardrobe alone - including a silver chain mail gown with matching helmet - makes it worth sitting through the occasional longueurs. And it's all offset to perfection by Ennio Morricone's coolly sensual jazz score.

Slightly left out of taste after watching, I became curious about the soundtrack created for the film by Ennio Morricone, which was ultimately heavily muted by the film itself and in an incomplete way resounds in the background in only a few moments of the film, making it somewhat empty, focusing heavily on the dialogue, while listening to the main melody we can experience an interesting two-channel sound, for some perhaps overwhelming the 2 diffrents rhythms played from both speakers, but in one tone. An artistic film , depicting not only the problem of finding love among 5 people, but also a young boy(Lino Capolicchio) who cannot quite find his way in the prevailing 60's in Italy, beaming with the atmosphere of a lost, slightly tired of life, but wanting to contribute something.

I watched this film recently, and it strongly fascinated me. I think it testifies a typical mood of 60's, with sexual freedom, new forms of attraction, and mockeries about middle-class' values. Here the author attacks the institution of marriage, and the conception of couple, playing with the characters as with the pieces of chess. Five main characters look for a balance of their sexual life, but the only solution seems to be the triangle, a new form of social institution, regular as the couple and the marriage. The film shows a very old style, no more valuable, with primary colours, heavy make-ups and some aged machine movements. And the characters are unbelievable, speaking by some literary style and far from any likelihood, but the subtended theory is interesting, sarchastic, acid, painful, and finally delivering and anti-hypocritical. And the cast is great, particularly Trintignant, Girardot and Musante. And what a marvellous score!!! Viva Ennio Morricone!!!