User reviews

In the Nineteenth Century, in Italy, the atheist and aristocrat Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) is married with Giuliana Hermil (Laura Antonelli) and has a paramour, Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O'Neill). He decides to leave his wife and to stay with Teresa, but after a period, she dispenses with him. Tullio comes back to his wife, but she had an affair with a writer, friend of his brother, and is pregnant. Tullio asks Giuliana to make an abort, but she refuses. When the child is born, Tullio hates him, but Giuliana tries to protect the baby. In the end, a tragedy happens. This movie is an intense drama, and certainly not indicated for a general public. The cast has an outstanding performance under the magnificent direction of Luchino Visconti. The movie shows also a wonderful and very detailed reconstitution of the Italian aristocracy in the Nineteenth Century. The very sad story does not bring redemption to any character. In Brazil, it is only available on VHS, but it deserves to be offered to the viewers by the distributors on DVD, to highlight the beauty of the scenes. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): `O Inocente' (`The Innocent')

Luchino Visconti's l'Innocente is a beautiful film. Magnificent details fill up the screen on every shot, as he has done so masterfully with other period films. It's also a strange, intense and erotic story set in the high society of Rome in the late 1800s. Giancarlo Gianinni is magnificent as an erratic, determined, egotistical and passionate man who alternates between arrogance and jealously, between lucidity and rage. Laura Antonelli is wonderful as his beautiful, repressed and enigmatic wife, who quietly surprises us at various points in this torrid tale. Jennifer O'Neill is very good as a mysterious and detached object of desire. This is a melodrama with some deeply disturbing themes. Occasionally, supporting characters show flashes of morality that contrast with the self-indulgent and self-destructive natures of the three protagonists. But the film does not need to have one character to provide a moral compass for the story, because the audience can see all too clearly everyone's very bad behavior.

Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) is a chauvinist aristocrat who flaunts his mistress (Jennifer O'Neill) to his wife (Laura Antonelli), but when he believes she has been unfaithful he becomes enamored of her again.

This movie is notable for being the last film made by Italian director Luchino Visconti, perhaps best known for "The Leopard". This time around he has really brought himself up to the 1970s and is not shy with the sensuality. Even the film's promo art seems to highlight the nudity, which is odd.

What strikes me about the movie is the casting of Jennifer O'Neill. I suspect that it was largely due to her look. She was a weak actress in "Rio Lobo", but seems to recover here (helped by the dubbing). She would go on to appear in "Scanners"... anyone who has worked with Visconti, Hawks and Cronenberg deserves some respect.

I saw "L' Innocent" in the mid-eighties, at at time when I was discovering a lot of Visconti's films from his last period ("Death in Venice"--my favorite--, "The Damned," and "Conversation Piece") It made a very favorable impression then; but I do agree with the viewer who dwelt on the languid pace of the film, highlighted by the sensuous musical score. What saddens me is that not one of the viewers commenting on the film --I have little to add regarding the plot, and am trying to avoid spoilers-has remarked that it is based on a novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio (né Gaetano Raspagnetta), the most popular and yet one of the most aristocratic "fin-de-siecle" writers in turn-of-the century Italy. Visconti, the majority of whose films are based on European 19th and 20th century novels, was extremely faithful to D'Annunzio' book, down to the morbidest details. D'Annunzio was a sensual man and what was regarded in his day as a "decadent" poet and novelist. His scenarios were usually luxurious, his characters were often relentless pleasure-seekers, albeit dissatisfied in their passionate search for the ultimate fulfillment of the senses. Tullio, the character so intensely played by Giancarlo Giannini, is a would-be Nietschean "superman", beyond good and evil, as "L'Innocent'(the novel) was inspired by the Italian poet's readings of the German philosopher.

Despite the slow pace of the film, I believe "L'Innocent' to be one of its director's most characteristic achievements. The glowing beauty of its female stars (fragile, yet alluring Jennifer O'Neill and earthy Laura Antonelli)and Giancarlo Giannini's seething intensity alone make this movie a worthwhile experience for cinema lovers who favor art over technology and substance over mindless, noisy violence.

Luchino Visconti is one of my favorite directors. I think Death in Venice is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. This film begins with the credits shown over a book with its pages being turned by a hand reminding me of Jeanne Cocteau's beginning for Beauty and the Beast (1946). Tullio (Giancarlo Gianni) is an aristocrat married to Laura Antonelli but he fools around shamelessly with Jennifer O'Neil. He's a bullshit artist at high speed, but one day he gets his come-uppance. He seems not to care about Antonelli's feelings, and one day she cheats on him with a novelist/writer. She is left pregnant, and Tullio is devastated. He cannot accept the child (who all thinks is his own). Visconti's films always have a certain disdain for rich people, and here his contempt is risen to art while telling a very engaging story. Gianni's performance is powerful stuff, while Antonelli is both beautiful and sad in equal measures. Not as good as Death in Venice but excellent nonetheless.

A wealthy and arrogant aristocrat openly has an affair with another woman, thus driving his wife to start her own affair with a writer that leads to a pregnancy and baby. Giancarlo Giannini is magnificent in a role that instills in the viewer zero sympathy and outright hostility. The film heads into what can only be described as one of the most memorably tragic conclusions since Shakespeare, and is also one of the most beautifully filmed and costumed movies ever, with sumptuous deep red wallpapered rooms with velvet curtains. Wealth and position can cut both ways, with Giannini's role going down into a dark and bankrupt morality that in the end is like a swamp.

There can be no doubt that Luchino Visconti was a master at putting together a film with class, style and beauty - and this is no different. A magnificent score from Franco Mannino (with plenty of classical assistance) and some fabulous cinematography from Pasqualiono de Santis breath much life into this - but not enough to compensate for a rather flawed, empty story with three really rather underwhelming performances. Tullio Hermil is "Giancarlo" a rather shallow pig of a man, who is married to Laura Antonelli ("Giuliana") and lives in their grand country palace whilst he constantly parades his glamorous mistress Jennifer O'Neill ("Teresa") for all to see. When he begins to suspect, however, that his wife has been ploughing her own furrow, he begins to get jealous and as with so many in the situation yearns for what he can no longer have. There is a real inevitability about how it will end and although our route to this denouement is bestrewn with gorgeousness and chic, Antonelli constantly reminded me of Anne Bancroft without, regrettably, the sophistication and charm and O'Neill, though certainly beautiful was almost as shallow as her paramour.

Could we qualify a movie as Ardent? I think so, at least I do when remembering this film. Maybe it's because of the smoldering story it tells, maybe because of the passionate characters temperament, maybe because of the gleaming beauty of the surroundings, the extremely luxurious interiors of upper class old noblesse, with their incredibly gorgeous 'Fin de Siecle' gowns and jewels and objects and music... What a superb film!

Jennifer O'Neil devastatingly beautiful and seductive as the self-assured, selfish, spoiled, ambitious, self-seeking lover, as much as Laura Antonelli as the opposite side of the coin but in a lower key, as the humble and insecure, betrayed, embittered, resentful wife, but also devastatingly gorgeous. And Giancarlo Giannini, holder of the most beautiful male green eyes ever shown on a close up, and adding to that his fantastically sensuous voice.

We end up watching this ultra-refined European product that only a Visconti and very few other directors (Kubrick with "Barry Lindon") could have had the exquisiteness of taste to produce.

The libretto is first rate and overwhelming in its slow development (and that makes almost unbearable the unpredictable climax) leaving us almost as devastated as its female protagonist, when she walks away while an early dawn starts defining the outline of the magnificent garden surrounding that incredibly perfect building where life had just ceased to exist.

After this film is over, you'll probably feel that you've just seen a quality movie for serious movie-goers. But while you're watching it, you may find yourself thinking than it needed a shot of adrenalin. It's an elegant and insightful drama, but very languidly paced. Apparently, everybody involved with it tried to give the (rather soapy) material more weight than it could hold, so almost everything - direction, acting, dialogue rhythms - seems kind of overdeliberate. Great last shot, though. (**1/2)

The languid pace of Visconti's last film is not a problem for me. He was an old man, directing from a wheelchair, and had slowed down a lot. Think of it as the long slow movement of a symphony by Mahler - whose music, you will remember, he used in Death in Venice - and it will make more sense.

What I want to know is more about Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel. One commentator claims that the male lead is a kind of 'atheistic hero' faithful to his beliefs, and that Visconti subverts the author's intention by showing him as a rich aristocrat as selfish as he is unpleasant. Can any authority on Italian literature shed any light?

Visconti's work is always refined and involves deep psychology that goes far beyond the elaborate and complex scenery. Passion in all forms is the theme of this film - love, betrayal, jealousy, egoism, arrogance, instincts, conflict, motives, reciprocity, revenge. Visconti although maintaining (as is his style always) a distance and although confines emotional outbursts to the minimum, he manages to reach the end of the road without a glitch. Death (suicide) and (self) destruction is the order of things. It is precisely because he believes in a deeper (or higher for others) order that is able to maintain his composure throughout this tempest of passions along all the way. Something very few people in the cinema have accomplished so far.

love often used misspelled abused love taken for a selfish game manipulating shame

he loved himself apart from that a selfish search for someone to confirm he is what he only pretends to be

was she crazy or insane was her love so true she bared the pain for her it was no game and yet she lost...

beautiful movie, timeless! delightfull to see how this movie takes his time to tell a story, the script is strong, the music emotional, the actors impressive, I can only write down positive aspects, thanks to visconti's perfectionism and talent this movie became more than a traditional story about love and hate. the thin line between the beauty of the movie and the manipulating selfish desire of the story creates a strong emotional masterpiece that will no one left untouched

Visconti's final film is a brutally beautiful masterpiece. As ever, the film is fetishistic in its attention to detail (witness the scene in which the two leads are having sex and the camera spends ages examining Luara Antonelli's exquisite shoes, bodice and stockings).

Giancarlo Giannini and Antonelli play a married couple whose pleasure and displeasure at each other's extramarital affairs border on the masochistic.

Giannini, the macho man whose personal moral code allows him not only to take a lover but to tell his wife in great detail about his lustings for his lover, is terrifying as the husband unable to choose between his wife and his lover, hurting both and eventually pleasing neither. But it is often overlooked that Antonelli, whose acting roles prior to 'L'innocente', featured such greats as 'Dr. Goldfoot and the Sex Bombs' and 'The Eroticist', startles as a woman who, although on first glance is 'more sinned against than sinning' but is equally manipulative and sadistic in her relationship with her husband, toying with him as he furiously attempts to make her admit to her indiscretions.

Following a debilitating stroke seemingly caused by the rigours of filming 'Ludwig', wheelchair-bound Luchino Visconti somehow managed to make two more films, neither of which display a dip in form and indeed are without the extravagant campness to which he had become prone. The second of these was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival two months after his death.

He had hoped to film an adaptation of D'Annunzio's novel 'The Child of Pleasure' but was unable to obtain the rights and instead settled for that author's 'L'Innocente' which features the character of Tullio who epitomises the Nietzschean 'higher man' who answers to no man, moral code and certainly not to God. It seems at one stage that he will get away with one of the most heinous of crimes and declares that 'no court on earth would sit in judgement on me' but here Visconti and his writers Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Enrico Medioli have created a punishment that is in keeping with Tullio's monstrous egotism and 'makes a natural conclusion to everything'.

Visconti had intended that Tullio be played by Alain Delon and one is fascinated as to what he would have brought to the role but this was not to be and although Giancarlo Giannini lacks Delon's charisma he is utterly convincing as a pathological narcissist whilst Laura Antonelli, arthouse pin-up of the 1970's, brings a captivating delicacy to her role as his put upon spouse. The character of Countess Teresa Raffo is somewhat shadowy in the novel and has been fleshed out here. Although not first choice for the role, under Visconti's direction Jennifer O'Neill is an absolute revelation and gives a performance of which this viewer at any rate would not have thought her capable. She is of course aided immeasurably by the seamless dubbing of Valeria Moriconi, a fine actress in her own right who receives a much-deserved mention as the closing credits roll.

Suffice to say Visconti's aestheticism and eye for detail are paramount here with score, production, set and costume designs of the highest order whilst Laura Antonelli's costume in certain scenes has been designed by Mother Nature!

Against the sumptuous backdrops Visconti depicts the infidelities, betrayals and double standards of a social class he knew so well.

The relatively minor role of one of Teresa's aristocratic admirers is played by Massimo Girotti who had played Gino the drifter in Visconti's 'Ossessione' in 1943. His presence here is most fitting for as one critic has observed 'this last film might not be Visconti's best but is as sublimely and deceptively subversive as his first'.

A second-best Luchino's movie after "The Leopard", with similar finish - theatrical "exeunt", as the symbol of mankind loneliness and incomprehensibility. Highly symbolical story - of narcissism and absolute control, disability to achieve a true love, and that's the reason why the whole story is told from the perspective of main character, who want to be absolute free, but, in the trail of Dostoevsky, we are told that absolute freedom leads not only to the crime, but also to the emptiness. Giannini at his best. Wonderful music of Mannini. Visually beautiful, in dark tones, thanks to Pasqualino de Santis, and coherent slow-pace, thanks to Ruggero Mastroianni.