Senso

I have rated this film 9 because of it's length, there are some ponderous moments, but otherwise it is a 10. Italian cinema was still having growing pains from the war, but this epic succeeds, and skillfully incorporates the war torn landscape into this tale of an earlier war. The music score is very big and melodramatic, but fitting. The film opens with an opera in an enormous opera house, and this is fitting for the grand scale and operatic scope of this romance and the background. This is "Gone With the Wind" - Italian style - with a much more sympathetic heroine.

I am a fan of Alida Valli and have sought out her work. Perhaps because this is in her native Italian, and/or because of her Italian director, she is a full, vital, feminine woman in this film; very different from her more restrained work in America. (Her breathtaking performance in "The Paradine Case" is a study in austerity and an almost masculine stillness.) I had hoped that we would see a more free actress in her native language, and we do! She flutters and tosses her hair, she is a Countess reveling in her earthy affair. This is a full bodied performance.

Farley Granger's performance, whether in response to Valli, or just given a really meaty bad-boy to play, is a total revelation. He is lusty and sexy, provocative, pouty and passionate. In one scene, he greets her by wordlessly grabbing her hand and almost devouring it with kisses. This is a rare film where both the woman AND the man have real powerhouse roles. The confrontation scene at the end is gripping.

A small but pivotal role is played by Marcella Mariani. Her cow-like leadenness, laced with sisterhood, bespeaks a worldliness that, paired with her ethereal youthful beauty is just wrenching. All supporting roles, especially the maids, are interesting and give a sense of intrigue throughout.

A previous reviewer mentioned that the outcome of a major plot point is cut out, which leaves you wondering... "but what happened with that?" Still, the major story is the romance, which I think will be satisfying for men as well as women, because both sides are given such full emotional life. IF YOU CAN FIND IT, it is an enjoyable, big emotion, epic wartime romance.

Wonderful movie, and quite unexpected at the time from the neorealist Visconti, finally letting some of the operatic juice flow into his film work. It's also the first of his explorations of Italian history and social change, to be followed by The Leopard and the fantastic Rocco and His Brothers.

One caveat: At a screening a couple of years ago at MoMA, I learned that it was the Italian government that was responsible for the snipping of some crucial scenes near the end of Senso, depicting the Battle of Custozza. These were meant to make his critique of the Italian ruling classes and their failure to pull together during this period of the risorgimento more explicit. But apparently the Italian government, fresh from defeat in WW II, didn't like the idea of a major movie showing an Italian army being beaten. So the episode was truncated, leaving a few people scratching their heads about what the point of it all was. Poor Visconti tended to make long movies, and often had trouble getting them shown at the proper length in the US, but this time it was his own government that stymied him!

As for the rest: Granger is fine, but it's Valli who gives one of the all-time great move star performances. What a great face! The story is written on it, and the director wisely keeps her the focus of attention.

Opens with a lush rendition of Il Trovatore at Teatro La Fenice, SENSO is an ostentatious melodrama imprinted with Visconti's pronounced blue blood opulence, retells an Italian countess' (Valli) vain and poignant attempt to pursue her one-sided affection to an Austrian officer (Granger shines in the rich Technicolor palette as an Adonis), whose misogyny and promiscuity will cause his own doom and mar her mentality up to the hilt.

The film sets its time during the fall of Austrian occupation in Venezia 1866, Valli is wavering between her bureaucratic husband (Moog) and rioting cousin (Girotti), to break loose from the stalemate, she irrevocably falls for a young lieutenant in the opponent camp, but he is no knight in shining armor but a foul and spineless scoundrel with irresistible sheen of deadly charm. Granger's gorgeous lover-boy image is a quintessential smokescreen to veil his despicable innards, but after all, it is a consensual deal despite of Valli's false hope, more significantly its anti-war signals have been forcibly cast by Granger's self-abandonment and the lousy war battlefield experienced by Girotti, which, more plausibly it is an intentional move by Visconti, a distraction from the central turmoil, but done with a tinge of amateurish fecklessness.

Valle shoulders on a profound effort to scrutinize a woman's inscrutable sexual desire which being repressed for too long, both she and Granger align themselves with Visconti's brimful-of- emotion style (again, thanks to Techincolor and the overstuffed score as well) which approximate the OTT threshold in certain degree, although falling out with Visconti eventually, Granger succeeds in bringing about his best screen persona and it was such a great era when a gay man can play an outright straight womanizer on the celluloid.

On the one hand SENSO fails to impress me as my favorite among Visconti's work of art, and scale-wise pales by comparison with LUDWIG (1972, 8/10) and THE LEOPARD (1963, 8/10), but on the other hand, only Visconti can flaunt such an overbearing melodrama with true mettle and without any compromise, a trend-setter would inspire later kindred spirits, for instance Baz Luhrmann's 3D adaption of the bourgeois sumptuosity THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, 8/10).

Senso was Visconti at his most elegant and aesthetic. It opened his series of historical spectacles. The film showed that epics and melodramas can entail political criticism as any other genres. Senso is his intelligent analysis about the Italian unification - Risorgimento. The film's criticism didn't please all the people and it suffered from censorship and it was edited several times. Nonetheless this aesthetically beautiful film still stands out as a fine ironic masterpiece.

The year is 1866 and the moment people have dreamed for decades - centuries - is in our hands. Garibaldi is coming and the Italians are beating the Austrians. In the middle of all this Visconti tells us a story about an Italian woman, who is the cousin of the leader of the underground resistance, who falls in love with an Austrian lieutenant. She is blinded by her romantic illusion and is ready to betray her family, friends, ideals and native land - these are part of the ethical problematics in Senso.

Senso was Visconti's first color film and he obviously had put a lot of effort to it. It's visually gorgeous and meant an aesthetic revolution for Italian cinema. It is no coincidence that it starts in an opera which Visconti did a lot himself too. The opening sequence shows us the basic power of Opera and melodrama - to change life, infrastructure without forgetting the concrete history.

Historical films always tell us about two different ages, intentionally or unintentionally: the one the story takes place in and the time it was made in. It's a film about the Italian unification but also a study about the deepest emotions in Italy during the 1950's. Italy after WWII, filled with neo realism - antifascist battle and hope for democracy. But also about the downside; the victory of the right-wingers and the beginning of the Cold War.

Senso is a gorgeous film which requires patience and love from its viewer. It's a political, ironic, revolutionary and aesthetic film. Truly one of the biggest landmarks in Visconti's career but also in the history of Italian cinema.

Whatever Anton Bruckner had in mind when writing his majestic Seventh Symphony, it probably wasn't as the score to a postwar Italian love story set during the Italian-Austrian conflicts of the Risorgiamento. Though the use of pre-existing classical music as backdrop for films is to be discouraged, here it works in surprising ways. Alida Valli is the Countess Livia Serpieri, in a loveless marriage to an older, collaborationist official. At the opera (Venice's La Fenice during Il Trovatore!) she meets up with a dashing young Austrian officer, Farley Granger. (Digression: After a handful of American films -- They Live by Night, Rope, Side Street, Strangers on a Train -- Granger journeyed to Italy to work with Visconti then fell off the screen for years, only to resurface in a few schlock films in the late 60s and early 70s. What happened to him?) They kindle up a clandestine and dangerous affair -- the wealthy older woman and the manipulative wastrel. After wheedling a small fortune out of her to bribe a doctor who declares him unfit to serve, he dumps her. But hell hath no fury....Luchino Visconti, assisted by the young Franco Zeffirelli -- both were opera directors, too -- pulls out all the stops, ending with a finale reminiscent of Tosca (but with a twist). Senso is a shameless and unforgettable wallow in Italianate passion -- unabashed verismo translated to the silver screen.