279. Senso (1954)

Directed By Luchino Visconti

Synopsis

A superficial countess betrays her principles for vanity, lust and a piece of ass... surprisingly the lust object is not all it is cracked up to be. Shock!

Review

The film starts with an Italian opera (Verdi's Il Trovatore) and soon you realise that the film is itself a non-musical (not very good) opera, I am sure that this was a thought out reference by Visconti, but it comes off as melodramatic, overacted, and simplistic.

Good for Visconti for filming in colour, now he could get actors that don't need dubbing for every single line! Oh and a good editor would be a plus, there are several occasions where there is a visible bleep in the film in very unsmooth cuts, suddenly someone's head is 2 inches to the left.

Who exactly are you supposed to sympathise with here? Certainly not the cheating, womanising, bastard Austrian officer, although I enjoyed him humiliating the even more insufferable countess. She is vain, betrays her political principles, only because suddenly a young officer of the army she opposes seems to like her, and she is taken over by lust as she is married to an old man. She is stupid, unsympathetic and weak and yet it seems like we are supposed to sympathise... not me. Visconti did a great film in Ossessione, but here he falls flat. Gets a 7 for the last 20 minutes or so, which are quite good, but you have a long way to get to those, and they are only good because she gets humiliated and he gets shot, making me happy. Oh and the war scenes were quite good, as were dresses, sets etc.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Tinto Brass adapted the story in 2002 as Senso '45 after reading the novella and finding himself unsatisfied with Visconti's version. The film starred Anna Galiena as Livia and Gabriel Garko as her lover. The story of the film is much more faithful to Camillo Boito's work than the earlier adaptation in terms of tone and story, but the action was transported from the War of Unification to the end of World War II, with Remigio becoming a Nazi Lieutenant and Livia updated to being the wife of a high ranking Fascist official. Brass later explained that the change in time was made because he couldn't possibly bring himself to compete with Visconti's vision of Risorgimento-era Italy. Unlike the 1954 version, Senso '45 did not romanticize the affair between Livia and Ruz (Helmut Schultz in the 2002 film), but showed it for what it was: a clinical study in vanity and lust.

Scene: