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The screen behind the opening credits fills up with serpentine cardiogram tape, followed by an oil painting beneath a magnifying glass, and there's the twilight Luchino Visconti spirit briskly evoked. The American professor in Rome (Burt Lancaster), a withdrawn aesthete, "neurotic, slightly disturbed" and at ease alone in his palazzo. In barges Silvana Mangano in fur-trimmed coat and Dietrich eyebrows, "Madame la Marquise de Merde" needs a place for her hotheaded gigolo and the apartment upstairs fits the bill, the gray owner protests until a slow zoom introduces Helmut Berger, scarfed and bereted to enhance a certain resemblance to Joe Dallesandro. A Berlin agitator, post-'68 but with a knack for Mozart, bleeding in the secret room once used for wartime partisans: "The price of progress is destruction," the ceiling literally cracks and crumbles with the new tenant. The tragedy of miscommunication between old and young, what else to do but laugh at it? Visconti in a mood of mellow reflection and fond acceptance, taking stock of The Damned and Death in Venice with My Man Godfrey in the back of his mind. "A slightly incestuous family, if I may say so," a tasteful ménage with the boy-toy, his mistress' spirited daughter (Claudia Marsani) and her stolid beau (Stefano Patrizi) concludes with an Auden stanza amid pot smoke. The staid library and the modernist penthouse, dilettantes and reactionaries talking politics and morality, "the search for the impossible." The sprawl of life as a tracking shot through the lavish living-room with Special Guest Specters (Dominique Sanda in close-up, Claudia Cardinale in slow-motion), the eve of death as a circular pan around a wall of canvases. Wild Strawberries plus Lear without children, out of such elements emerges the burnished comedy of the grump awakened just in time for his demise. With Elvira Cortese, Guy Tréjan, Jean-Pierre Zola, and Romolo Valli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |