L’Innocente
Koch Lorber, $24.98In his 30-year career as a writer and director, Luchino Visconti took elegance and sumptuousness to rarefied heights. One of the founders of the Italian neorealist school, Visconti transcended easy definitions by combining that movement’s passion for psychological veracity with the elegance and romanticism of his aristocratic upbringing, creating films that are simultaneously emotionally stark and visually lavish. And nowhere was this balance more wonderfully struck than in the director’s last film, L’Innocente, a masterwork of late-19th century sexual mores and a crash course in the possibilities of set design. Every inch of every shot is bursting with red velvet, Persian rugs, ornate jewelry, lavish gowns, and painstakingly arranged floral bouquets (not to mention stockings and bodices). All the better to disguise the thousand acts of petty cruelty, jealousy, and narcissism that threaten to drag the film’s heroes and heroines into the mire of total amorality.
Giancarlo Giannini stars as Tullio Hermil, a Roman gentleman who tortures his wife, Giuliana (Laura Antonelli), with details of his very public affair with a wealthy widow. Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill), a self-described “free and unconventional woman,” tempts Hermil with her sensuality but pushes him away whenever he gets too close. A chauvinist through and through, Hermil has no problem rubbing his wife’s face in his infidelities, but when she begins an affair of her own, the husband is consumed with jealousy, which leads to madness, which leads to tragedy. Like “an ill person who rejoices in his own illness,” Hermil is just so typically male – both jealous and dismissive, both needy and cold, both in love with love and in love with losing love – he wants everything when he wants it and nothing when he doesn’t.
Though L’Innocente was first released in 1976, it has never appeared on DVD in the U.S. until now. All the rich colors and ornate details of Visconti’s film are lovingly translated on this disc; pity, though, that the same can’t be said for the film’s Italian dialogue. I don’t know who was in charge of subtitles, but whoever it was should be shunned at all translators’ conventions from this moment forward for the hash he made of L’Innocente – mistaking “fell” for “feel,” typing “audition” where Visconti wrote “auction,” and throwing around apostrophes and other punctuation marks willy-nilly. This may sound like nitpicking, but Visconti was nothing if not obsessed with detail, and surely his last movie deserves nothing less.
This article appears in April 10 • 2009.