L'INNOCENTE: Blu-ray (Rizzoli Films, 1976-79) Film Movement
The swan song of maestro extraordinaire, Luchino
Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, L’innocente (1976) returns
the director to his obsession with toxic relationships among the uber-rich and supposedly cultured. Initially, one of
the founding members of post-war Italian neorealism, Visconti’s aspirations to
make the sort of lavishly appointed melodramas, virtually unseen on the screen
since MGM in its heyday, and elsewhere long-since departed from then ‘present-age’
movie culture, are anchored in a decaying aristocracy from another time,
brought forth as lushly wrought ulterior universes where love is often lethal
and passion, inflammatory and capricious, easily to unravel the mores and manners
of this otherwise socially-constricted hierarchy. Visconti was severely ailing
at the time he made L’innocente, and would die shortly after the picture’s
completion. It would take another three years before L’innocente reached
the public, states’ side, only to be misinterpreted as inferior or a mere regurgitation
of themes already explored in Visconti’s ensconced body of bona fide classics,
among them - The Leopard (1963), The Damned (1969), and, Death
in Venice (1971). Visconti had, in fact, not made another movie in two
years, and, with L’innocente, sincerely hoped to leave his definitive
mark on this particular brand of plushly-padded melodrama.
Yet, only in hindsight was this miracle achieved. Stately,
yet sensual, L’innocente (liberally adapted from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
1892 novel) is decidedly a movie from another time, and, despite its actual
date of creation, actually plays much more like a mid-sixties’ road show epic –
albeit, one, slightly truncated and imbued with that seventies’ verve for
explicit nudity. We get equal opportunity sexism here, more than a flash of
co-star, Laura Antonelli’s ample and ripe, heaving cleavage; Antonelli, playing
the long-suffering wife, Giuliana Hermil, momentarily ravaged by her desperate
and sweaty husband, Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini, in a role originally intended
for Alain Delon) who would rather be diddling his haughty and defiant mistress,
Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill) on whose emasculating influence is poisoned
his desire for all aspirations in a happy marriage. The more shocking
bit of exposed flesh, is a full-frontal of Marc Porel, as the debonair author, Filippo
d'Arborio, emerging proud and glistening from a communal shower, his hooded
snake begrudgingly venerated by Tullio’s blood-thirsty gaze, already knowing
his wife has sampled the goods to
counteract her own crazed jealousy over Tullio’s frequent dalliances with Raffo. Porel,
who cuts a dashing figure with or without his clothes on, was an alumnus of
nearly 40 films by the time he appeared in L’innocente, rather
tragically, to die of Meningitis in 1984, at only 34-yrs. of age.
The title, L’innocente, refers to the illegitimate
love child conceived by Giuliana and Filippo’s passion; a robust male Giuliana
is insistent to rear as the heir-apparent, and, whom Tullio comes to bitterly
resent for obvious reasons, as to one day bequeath his family estate to this bastard is an anathema to his own way of life. Tullio’s disgust is compounded as
his mother (Rina Morelli) feigns the child as her son’s and praises his
vitality and beauty to the rafters. Much later, the screenplay by Suso Cecchi
d'Amico, Enrico Medioli and Visconti, infers Tullio has smothered the babe to avenge
his own covetous hatred for Giuliana’s momentary happiness with d’Arborio,
thwarted when d’Arborio succumbs to a tropical infection. The thinly veiled, yet
all-consuming porosity of such deviant behavior is basically what infuses L’innocente’s
125 minutes with a sort of magnetic period romanticism turned rancid under
Visconti’s graceful command of the cinema language. Here is a devastating interlace
of Visconti’s own nobility (he did, in fact, hail from the aristocracy he sought
to expose) and his life-long embrace of theoretical Marxism. Evoking the
sad-eyed privilege of a doomed civilization on the cusp of disintegration (a reoccurring
theme in Visconti’s films), L’innocente exorcises Visconti’s verve for
period fatalism at its most transcendent and vicious.
At the outset, Visconti gives us an affair already
curdled by envy; Tullio, a turn-of-the-century Roman toff, unable to satisfy a
demanding mistress, yet totally patronizing toward his acutely aggrieved wife –
who knows the score, but is keeping face, mostly to satisfy the waggling
tongues of fair-weather friends during a recital. This, of course, is what is
known as ‘fooling the world.’ However, Ruffo’s whimsicality where love is concerned
(she teases Tullio by giving every indication of a suitable rival in Count Stefano
Egano, played by Massimo Girotti), combined with Giuliana’s unexpected attraction to d’Arborio
is increasingly the bane of Tullio’s indecision. Having forsaken his wife to
pursue his lover, Tullio implores his brother, Federico (Didier Haudepin) to
oversee and placate her anxieties during his absence. And while Federico is as
uncaring towards his sister-in-law, he serves as the catalyst to inadvertently
introduce her to the gallant d’Arborio, whom she meets after having taken too
much of a potion to help her sleep, and momentarily fainting in his arms. D’Arborio
is immediately taken with Giuliana’s charms. Meanwhile, Tullio endeavors to rid
himself of his desire for Ruffo, making a full confession to his wife, and
begging her indulgence to invest in his cure. Momentarily, she agrees. And
while the two experience a very brief renaissance in their marital bond, the ‘ever
after’ is thwarted when Tullio’s mother informs him of Giuliana’s pregnancy,
for which he knows well enough he cannot be the father.
From here, the couple are ravaged by competing suspicions,
teetering between tormented ecstasy and abject hatred for one another. Clearly
viewed as the catalysts for the rise of fascism in Italy, Visconti spends the
rest of L’innocente in a treatise of marital infidelity, chiding Tullio
as the atheistic libertine on whom all responsibilities for the resulting ills
of the aristocracy at large, yet to afflict and dismantle it entirely, are
blamed. The inference Tullio has murdered the child of his wife’s lover is not
derived from Gabriele D’Annunzio source material, but adds an even more devastating layer
of fatalism. Unable to reconcile, Tullio retreats into even more failed
ruminations with a lover who no longer feels anything towards him. Recognizing
his complete failure as a man, Tullio removes a small pistol from the desk
drawer and, in his lover’s presence, takes his own life with a single fatal gunshot
to the chest. Disbelieving, but cruel and calculating nonetheless, Ruffo casually
departs the villa she once shared with Tullio for parts unknown, leaving the
discovery of his corpse to the servants.
L’innocente is exquisitely tricked out in period trappings conceived
by longtime
Visconti collaborators, Mario Garbuglia and Piero Tosi. Pasqualino DeSantis’
cinematography is of another time entirely. L’innocente just feels like
a movie made at the height of the sixties’ verve for lavishly appointed road
show period spectacles. There is nothing of the 1970’s in it, except, perhaps, its
brief departures into gratuitous sex and nudity – arguably, dealt unexpected tastefulness
by Visconti, especially when directly compared to similarly depicted moments in
other movies from this vintage. Precisely the sort of grand entertainment that
could so easily have been misconstrued as suffering from more than faint whiff
of the embalmer’s fluid, made by an ardent purveyor of that ‘once edgy’ new movement
in film, now considered ‘old hat’ and dated, comparatively speaking, it is
Visconti’s professionalism here that prevents L’innocente from devolving
into an opulently conceived waxworks or mere homage to those ‘better’, finer
days when movies were still considered as popular art – hopefully, also, to
make money.
Visconti, who later professed to a series of
homosexual affairs, most notably with Helmut Berger, who starred in The Damned,
and director, Franco Zeffirelli, was to suffer a stroke in 1972, likely brought
about by his chronic addiction to cigarettes. Four years later, Visconti was
felled by a fatal stroke; L’innocente, posthumously released in the U.S.
to critical acclaim, although not much box office. And although hailed as a
founding father of neorealism, Visconti was to steadily depart from its stark
visual precepts as early as 1954, preferring these uber-plush escapisms into
period drama with a sexual edge, set against some such political turmoil. The
Damned would earn Visconti an Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay – the only
recognition he would receive in the United States in his lifetime. Viewed today,
L’innocente ironically reveals how little – and yet, how much – Visconti’s
house style had evolved over the decades. It very much suggests a sequel to The
Leopard; that sad-eyed insinuation and continuation of the aristocracy’s
slow, sad implosion, on a more heart-sore level of personalized degradation. Although
passion dictates, its sway here is viewed as incredibly injurious by Visconti,
who indulges in a sensual tome with operatic overtones teetering on Greek tragedy.
Our triumvirate, ill-fated and destined to
self-destruct - the vigorous mistress, Sicilian grandee and highborn wife – cannot
escape Visconti’s unbearable austerity where love is concerned. Lust, in its
lieu, willfully tempts, even as it demands absolute discipline from the soul,
if total abandonment of the body.
Tullio, dashing but disdainful, is first revealed in,
then utterly stripped of, his absolute cruelty toward a wife he rather
insidiously molests and emotionally starves to pursue the, as self-absorbed countess,
destined to do him wrong. His odious magnanimity is tested by both the embittered
wife and the shrewish mistress until he lashes with Saturnine-like vengeance
against the only person truly incapable of self-defense – the bastard offspring
from Giuliana’s grand amour. As this scornful appraisal of male narcissism,
Giancarlo Giannini lingers in astute shades as the irresistible villain we
strangely come to understand, if never to admire, while Laura Antonelli, whose
cherub-esque visage belies her voluptuous physique, conveys a piercing sense of
wounded pride. Visconti's sophisticatedly ordered portrait of this embalmed
society, bewitched by itself, yet suffocating on its own ether of
self-preserving formaldehyde, with Pasqualino De Santis’ majestic cinematography, maintain
this air of appreciation and more than a whiff of ridicule and disdain for this
dying dynasty. In the final analysis, L’innocente is as accomplished,
stylized and magnificent as anything Visconti ever committed to film.
L’innocente arrives on Blu-ray state’s side via Film Movement in a
generally pleasing 1080p transfer that very much replicates the look of the old
Cult Films ‘region B’ disc release from 2009. De Santis’ camerawork looks
spectacular – mostly – the image exposing a robust, but subdued palette of
colors with slightly unnatural looking flesh tones. Flesh leans toward the
piggy pink patina. Tonality, while solid, strangely lacks the necessary ‘oomph’
to make the colors pop as they should. Contrast seems a tad anemic too.
Age-related artifacts are not present. The image is smooth with a modicum of
film grain appearing indigenous to its source. I wasn’t exactly bowled over by
this presentation, though it vastly improves on previous home video
incarnations. We get a PCM Italian mono with English subtitles. Owing to limitations in vintage recording,
and the fact this is primarily a dialogue-driven drama with few instances to exercise
any sonic resonance, the mono gets the job done with crisp-sounding dialogue, never
to strain the ears, and without any strident misfires. The only extra of merit
here is ‘Reframing L’innocente’ – a really bland video essay by Ivo Blom,
lasting barely 12-minutes, with sparse commentary fitted between snippets of
scenes. There is also a fairly comprehensive 16-page booklet with an essay by
Dan Callahan. Bottom line: Visconti’s final visual masterpiece is well worth
your coin. Were that a bit more care had been poured into this remastering
effort, and certainly, more due diligence when creating extra content to
augment our appreciation of the movie. Oh well, can’t have everything.
Recommended.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
4
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
1
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