A Primeira Noite de Tranqüilidade

In Italy, the gambler and professor of poetry Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon) arrives in the seaside town of Rimini and is hired to teach for four months in the Liceu replacing another teacher. His relationship with his mate Monica (Lea Massari) is in crisis and he spends most of the time with his new acquaintances and gamblers Giorgio Mosca (Giancarlo Giannini), Marcello (Renato Salvatori) and Gerardo Pavani (Adalberto Maria Merli). In classroom, he meets the gorgeous nineteen years old mysterious student Vanina Abati (Sonia Petrova), who is Gerardo's girlfriend, and he feels a great attraction for her. They meet and know each other outside class, and they fall in love for each other. Their relationship leads to a tragic end.

"La Prima Notte di Quiete" is a cold, melancholic, cruel and tragic story, with magnificent performance of Alain Delon, perfectly developing the character of a desperate atheist man in existentialistic crisis. The beautiful cinematography and the music score are cold, as the environment of Rimini, Sonia Petrova is one of the most gorgeous actresses I have ever seen and is also perfect in the role of an young woman with a hidden past. The personal dramas are disclosed and developed in a slow pace and are very sad. Unfortunately there is no other movie available on VHS or DVD in Brazil of this great Italian director Valerio Zurlini, who seems to have been forgotten by our national distributors. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "A Primeira Noite de Tranquilidade" ("The First Night of Tranquility")

Valerio Zurlini is not a household name but he is a director I love, Here he has the great Enrico Medioli as his writing partner and Alain Delon as his leading man. Cold, arid, fascinating tale. From Delon's substitute professor to Sonia Petrova's beautiful student nobody ever smiles, or very rarely. The wonderful Giancarlo Giannini is the one that brings the color and the joy and Alida Valli provide us with one hell of a scene. Rimini is also a character, a cold Rimini, out of business and an air of Fellini's I Vitelloni in the air. Very rewarding in its desolation.

I'm starting to gain more appreciation for Alain Delon after seeing some more of his 1970s work, because he's an actor who proved himself willing to take on more challenging and unexpected roles as he got a little older. I don't think age affected his looks too much (he's almost 40 here, and kind of made to look a little rough/disheveled, but is still typically dashing), but his roles earlier did sometimes feel a bit heart-throbby, admittedly still broken up by films like Le Samourai.

He's really good in Indian Summer, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. It's slow but effectively melancholic; not a fun film, but it works well as a character study.

This is forgotten Italian master Valerio Zurlini's third best film after "Family Diary" and "Le Soldattese." It features one of Alain Delon's very best performances and an equally good supporting one from Giancarlo Giannini. Delon plays a hard-drinking and gambling professor of poetry who is fascinated by the sullenness of a beautiful student(Sonia Petrovna) and gradually falls in love with her. He finds out through his gambling buddies that she is involved in a pornography-prostitution operation of some kind. Zurlini's great film uses a slightly over-the-top melodramatic style to delve deep into the existentialist despair of Delon's character as he hangs around the discos of a very liberal and swinging early '70s post-sexual-revolution Italy, depressed by all the empty people around him desperately trying to distract themselves any way they can. The underlying Antonioni-like theme of people trying to distract themselves and merge into a crowd rather than individuate and painfully grow is very similar to that of "Desert of the Tartars," a film that couldn't be more different than "The Professor" on the surface. Dario Di Palma's deep-focus color cinematography in this film is one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous displays of virtuosity this side of Carlo Di Palma's soft-focus work in Antonioni's "Red Desert."

I was forced to settle for an unbelievably awful home brew English subtitle pirated copy so my take away is more of an emotional impression than a deep understanding. Apparently Delon hated working with this director and it didn't click enough with audiences to ever get a proper international dvd release. Boo! That being said, the solemn, hopeless beauty of the outsider leads and their star crossed romance screams of untold potential. I just wish I had a better idea of what was going on than just an outline of depressed, lonely teacher + disillusioned young student + gambling problem + Italian mafia = tragedy. Seriously, the only available English subtitling is so bad that it was like reading the cliff notes of a mad man who is incapable of complete sentences.