Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

 

Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Cast: Farley Granger, Alida Valli, Massimo Girotti, Heinz Moog, Rina Morelli, Christian Marquand, Sergio Fantoni, Marcella Mariani. Screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Carlo Alienello, Giorgio Bassani, Giorgio Prosperi, based on a novel by Camilo Boito. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker. Production design: Ottavio Scotti. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Costume design: Marcel Escoffier, Piero Tosi.

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)

Renato Salvatori and Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco Parondi: Alain Delon
Simone Parondi: Renato Salvatori
Nadia: Annie Girardot
Rosaria Parondi: Katina Paxinou
Vincenzo Parondi: Spiros Focás
Ginetta: Claudia Cardinale
Ciro Parondi: Max Cartier
Luca Parondi: Rocco Vidolazzi
Morini: Roger Hanin

Director: Luchino Visconti
Story and screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli
Based on a novel by Giovanni Testori
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Garbuglia
Music: Nino Rota

When Rocco cries out, "Sangue! Sangue!" on finding Nadia's blood on his brother Simone's jacket, I almost expect to hear Puccini on the soundtrack instead of Nino Rota. It's one of those moments that cause Rocco and His Brothers (along with other films by Luchino Visconti) to be called "operatic." It's "realistic" but in a heightened way -- the word for it comes from the realm of opera: verismo. The moment is in the same key as the actual murder of Nadia, along with her earlier rape by Simone, and the numerous highly volatile scenes of the family life of the Parondis. It's what makes Rocco and His Brothers feel in many ways more contemporary than Michelangelo Antonioni's more cerebral L'Avventura, which was released in the same year. Movies have gone further in the direction of Rocco -- think of the films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola -- than they have in the direction of Antonioni's oeuvre. I have room in my canon for both the raw, melodramatic, and perhaps somewhat overacted Rocco and the enigmatically artful work of Antonioni, however.

Watched on Filmstruck

Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)

Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice

I have nothing against slowness in movies if it leads to a satisfactorily immersive experience, but Death in Venice is just languorous, taking its own weary way toward the conclusion promised in the film's title. Watching it patiently has some rewards: Dirk Bogarde's fine performance as Gustave von Aschenbach; the sometimes opulent, sometimes melancholy views of Venice provided by Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography; the handsome sets by Ferdinandino Scarfiotti and costumes by Piero Tosi; loving glimpses of Silvana Mangano as Tadzio's mother; and great gulps of Mahler's third and fifth symphonies on the soundtrack. But the screenplay by Visconti and Nicola Badalucco carries no intellectual or emotional weight. Thomas Mann's novella is meant to be savored and reflected upon, but film inevitably carries us along with our expectations of action, and there is little enough of it going on anywhere but in Aschenbach's head to provide Visconti with something to shoot. He resorts to flashbacks: to the illness that causes Aschenbach to take his fatal trip, to the happy days of Aschenbach's marriage (Marisa Berenson plays his wife) and the devastating death of their child, to a visit to a prostitute who plays Beethoven's Für Elise on the piano, to the storm of cheers and boos at the performance of Aschenbach's composition (actually an excerpt from the Mahler third symphony) and an argument with a friend (Mark Burns) about his music. Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) clearly represents something that has been lost from (or never present in) Aschenbach's life, But Visconti never makes Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio either psychologically or thematically convincing. In the end we're left with little more than Aschenbach as the aging gay man doomed to a lonely death -- a too-familiar trope.