luisab99

A man and a woman meet in the same hotel in the south of France, while spending their respective holidays alone. The movie was released in 1972, when an unmarried woman of 30 was still called "spinster" and people, either men or women, were mocked for their being single, in two different ways. Several moments of inappropriate humor follow each other: "Do you want a room in order to sleep or to make love?" asks the receptionist, and suddenly shows a false embarrassment, hiding some mockery, when he sees that the man who has just asked for a room is alone. The woman is constantly shown on her own on the beach, making clumsy moves inside a big poncho to change out of her wet swimsuit, while around her, groups of people chat, flirt, and enjoy happily. In this movie (and the French should be known for being open-minded and avant-garde...) single people are sort of "aliens", lonely, goofy and pitiful and, when a man and a woman of that kind meet, it seems they are required to "combine their loneliness", no matter if they might not like each other completely. The same mocking humor invests the minor characters, no more than caricatures (the nymphomaniac chambermaid, the Anglican priest always talking of death, his wife who fasts and has stigmata drawn on her hands and feet...). Nothing happens, except for some stupid dialogues and some small awkward incidents, the background of the two characters is not revealed and a possible relationship between the two is just a (future) possibility. And what does the ending mean, with the two young girls, the same who talk nonsense in the first scene, now missing their train? If the original title is disrespectful, the Italian one, "La tardona", is highly offensive.

The source of this movie is a book (same Italian title) by Giorgio Saviane. The young Sena breaks her long-lasting relationship with Paolo, her former university professor, for unknown reasons. After some time, they start to see each other again, and the reason of the rupture soon comes up: a vital contrast that definitely opposes each other (and that I prefer not to mention). Since no solution is possible, the only way is to kill their love, still alive and passionate, like one (as the original title suggest) may kill a patient suffering from an incurable disease. The movie reflects some social issues of the late '70s in Italy and the story is centered on the selfishness and presumption of an intellectual, filled with some post-68 anti-bourgeois culture. The concrete needs of the woman are in contrast with the abstract and controversial ideas of the man, who could perfectly give them up to please the woman he loves so deeply, but he doesn't, and does not even understand the suffering he has already inflicted on her for the same purpose. Enrico Maria Salerno was an excellent actor but I personally love him also as a director, and loved this intense and melancholic movie. I just wonder why on earth the writer of the book chose for the female character the weird name of Ursenna, shortened as Sena.