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Elektra in the white convertible, a murky memory of war and resistance. She (Claudia Cardinale) is a socialite at a Parisian cocktail party, her visage grows pensive at the sound of a certain tune, the beckoning jangle of past and home. "The strangest house," part palace and part museum, receives her and her American husband (Michael Craig) in the Tuscany village that's being swallowed up by landslides. Howling wind and pop music from a transistor radio mingle at night, a little tour de force to introduce the estranged brother (Jean Sorel) out of the shadows and into their affairs. "Sorry to disillusion you, but there are no ghosts in here." Horror of remembrance, le temps d'un retour, Luchino Visconti in transition. (The inquiry culminates in The Damned, after which begins a new period.) Youthful indiscretions are grist for the mill of the wastrel with literary aspirations, his scandalous roman à clef is named after the ursine constellation in reference to Leopardi. Children's games, a family curse. "Due monstri," actually more than two—mother (Maria Bell) tears into pianos at the clinic, stepfather (Renzo Ricci) is a frazzled barrister, between them a whole Ossessione of their own. (Agamemnon was a scientist and a casualty of Auschwitz, an official dedication is meant to alliviate the betrayal.) The theme is celestial illumination (cf. Bertolucci's Luna), at its service a fierce chiaroscuro: The siblings embrace in a half-lit underground hall, the sister ascends a spiral staircase while the brother stays behind, a zoom finds them as upside-down reflections on cloudy water. The note in the clock and the ring in the catacomb, "old Etruscan walls" and the ticket to New York. "End scene. Fine della commedia." De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is strikingly related. Cinematography by Armando Nannuzzi. With Fred Williams, Amalia Troiani, and Vittorio Manfrino. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |