Le professeur

'La prima notte di quiete', the 1972 film by Valerio Zurlini , has three different titles. It was released on the English speaking market as 'Indian Summer', a title that has an explanation somewhere in the film, but has little to do with what happens on screen. In France it is known as 'Le professeur'. The film is an Italian-French co-production, but can be considered as belonging to Italian cinema. It is the penultimate of the only nine feature films left by Zurlini, a director whose life and career have been roo short, enough to leave behind a few solid films, including this one, but no masterpiece. 'La prima notte di quiete' can be described as being somewhere between a romantic social drama and existential cinema. It is an interesting film, with many qualities, even if it fails to reach the peaks of those years by Pasolini or Antonioni, the masters of the respective genres in the Italian cinema of the time.

The film opens with a very beautifully filmed scene (like the whole film) on kind of a 'Quai des Brumes'. The lonely man by the sea is the literature teacher Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon), who has just arrived in the city of Rimini, which in this film looks more like a port city at the North Sea than on the Adriatic Sea. We are in the early '70s, in the midst of a sexual revolution, and the teacher has been in a relationship sprinkled with infidelity on both sides and routinely threatened by boredom for several years with Monica (Lea Massari), a woman his age (30+). He tries to balance his life with a passion for card games, which gets him in touch with the libertine underworld environment of the city. Daniele notices in his class Vanina (Sonia Petrovna), a 19-year-old young woman. The interest for the girl, who is beautiful and different from her colleagues, turns into attraction, and then into devouring passion, despite or maybe just fuelled by differences in age, class and culture, and by the dangerous environment and dubious entourage of the girl.

Zurlini planned to make out of this film a first episode in a more complex social and family saga, covering several decades of post-war Italian history. There are some clues in the film about the teacher's father, a venerated hero who fell in the war, and the ending broadens the context by alluding to the family that does not play another role in the plot. As this film remained the only one in the planned cycle, it remains rather a snapshot of a specific moment in the history of Italy - the early 70s - and of a well-defined social environment, that of provincial cities touched by a modernity with mixed consequences while facing a conservatism of another era that is struggling to maintain its influence. Alain Delon creates a role specific to this peak period of his career, that of the man who internalises his feelings in an inner boil. Sonia Petrovna is a fascinating partner, with a look foretelling Monica Bellucci, in the role of a brutally grown-up young woman. In addition to Lea Massari, Alida Valli, another legend of Italian film, also appears in an episodic role. Dario Di Palma's cinematography brings to life the image of a coastal Italy very different from that of tourist postcards. Some frames are anthological, such as that of the sea and the sky captured in the same grey colour and separated only by a restless horizon line. Mario Nascimbene's soundtrack uses copiously jazz music with saxophone and trumpet solos. There are many good reasons to see 'La prima notte di quiete' and just as many reasons to regret that this film remained just a building block of an unfinished edifice.

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.

Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon), a kind, melancholic and probably depressed teacher in his late forties, becomes the new substitute teacher at a high school in Rimini. He shares his life with Monica (Lea Massari), another depressed person, but he seems more interested in escaping from his relationship than cultivating it, finding refuge in a group of local layabouts between cards, discos and parties.

At school, Daniele develops an almost instantaneous interest in Vanina (Sonia Petrova), the most melancholic student - and, coincidentally, also the prettiest. One might wonder if that "melancholy" would have affected him as much if Vanina had not been so attractive. The girl, despite her young age, seems to have a dark past, including an ambiguous boyfriend Gerardo (Adalberto Merli), a shady guy who drives her around in a Ferrari.

Between a cultural exchange in Monterchi and a depressing party at the disco, the passion between Daniele and Vanina grows, even if their relationship seems accelerated by an editing that seems to narrow the story into the space of a week or so. When Vanina is sent away from Rimini by her mother, a convincing Alida Valli in a shrew version, Daniele decides to follow her, after a turbulent love interlude in a melancholic shack on the beach. But life, always ready to put everyone back in their place, does not offer a happy ending.

The plot does not shine for originality, given that literature, cinema and even rock music are full of stories of sex (or love?) between teachers and students ("Don't stand so close to me", just to name one example), and these stories rarely have a happy ending, but it is partially redeemed by the setting in a wintry, decadent and squalid Rimini. And, of course, by the handsome Delon, whose unrivaled charm is here emphasized by a rumpled look and a soft cashmere coat that adds an irresistible touch.

Cons? The excessively sentimental, morbid and obsessive tone, with cultural pretensions right from the title, and a 70s soundtrack that stands out for its jarring, almost unbearable, notes of trumpet and saxophone.

Not a masterpiece, but if you are curious to find out if Delon was a good actor, this film could be a starting point.

As someone unfortunate to have sit through the two and a half hours of the original version, I cannot advise this movie to anyone.

The plot suffers from bad slow placing, the story goes nowhere, and there is so much so messed up that made all my friends uncomfortable as they watched the movie. The cast is okay, but the writing is a solid turd.

You have better out there.

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."