Visconti´s L’Innocente is beautiful. So beautiful that it fails to irritate. As well it should: here is a story of the 19th century Italian rich aristocrats, who live in houses full of breathtaking art: bronze statuary, polychrome marbles, brocades, stone inlays, kakiemon, Japanese lacquerware, Chinese screens, alabasters, Napolitan urns; beautiful villas with spacious rooms and high ceilings, with airy verandas and well groomed gardens which seem to go on forever. They spend their days hunting, fencing, and going to auctions and the opera. They live the superior life of aesthetic and athletic attainment rarely given to ordinary mortals. Yet, Visconti tells us, they are stupid, petty, and maladroit in managing their personal lives: despite all those artistic wonders in their lives, they manage to feel anxious and empty, and like any working class girl look for fulfillment in love, experience jealousy, and are easily manipulated. Is Visconti lying? How can such aesthetically attained men be so life-stupid? Does Visconti know what he is talking about? Does D’Annunzio, the author of the tale? Do they in fact know such men?
I managed to enjoy the film all the same. In the foreground the heroine betrays her husband, he murders her illegitimate child then blows his brains out, but I take it all in in passing, as it were, not paying it much attention somehow. My eyes are firmly on the background: a magnificent alabaster fireplace covered in brilliant grotesques, a marquetry jewelery box by the bedside, black obsidian krateri on the living room table. To me the story is no more than an excuse to show these things. I wonder whether the story is even necessary. How would the film be if we had the same sets -- without the story?
I feel similarly about Luz Silenciosa (Stelle Licht) by Carlos Reigadas. The story of a love triangle among the Germanoid-speaking Russian Menonites of Chihuahua has the usual: love, jealousy, suffering, loyalty, death, guilt; even resurrection. The reviewer on Internet Movie Database feels there was not enough plot. I think there was too much: the beautiful 6 minute shots of sunrise and sunset, and of the amazing ados happening in the big sky, the brief flashes of red and yellow dirt roads running down among green fields – they were the best part of the film, just as the magnificent interiors of Luccan villas were the best part of L’Innocente.
Now, really, I am tired of men's love stories. They are nothing but the same damn thing over and over and over again; and they are not just tiresome; they are dumb, too. Anyone with half a brain would be able to avoid their troubles or work a simple way out. Why anyone should feel the urge to make them into 2 hour movies beats me blue and black.
I managed to enjoy the film all the same. In the foreground the heroine betrays her husband, he murders her illegitimate child then blows his brains out, but I take it all in in passing, as it were, not paying it much attention somehow. My eyes are firmly on the background: a magnificent alabaster fireplace covered in brilliant grotesques, a marquetry jewelery box by the bedside, black obsidian krateri on the living room table. To me the story is no more than an excuse to show these things. I wonder whether the story is even necessary. How would the film be if we had the same sets -- without the story?
I feel similarly about Luz Silenciosa (Stelle Licht) by Carlos Reigadas. The story of a love triangle among the Germanoid-speaking Russian Menonites of Chihuahua has the usual: love, jealousy, suffering, loyalty, death, guilt; even resurrection. The reviewer on Internet Movie Database feels there was not enough plot. I think there was too much: the beautiful 6 minute shots of sunrise and sunset, and of the amazing ados happening in the big sky, the brief flashes of red and yellow dirt roads running down among green fields – they were the best part of the film, just as the magnificent interiors of Luccan villas were the best part of L’Innocente.
Now, really, I am tired of men's love stories. They are nothing but the same damn thing over and over and over again; and they are not just tiresome; they are dumb, too. Anyone with half a brain would be able to avoid their troubles or work a simple way out. Why anyone should feel the urge to make them into 2 hour movies beats me blue and black.
Really, the world is so much more interesting without men in it to dumb it down. Can we please just have the background from now on?
(Sheherezade’s view of the same two films is the same but opposite. While I found it implausible that rich, educated, cultured men of leisure (L’Innocente) would live such stupid lives, fraught with such silly concerns, her take was a disbelief that spiritual, religious people (Luz Silenciosa) who refuse worldly goods, “do not believe in façades” – as she puts it, or – another good turn of phrase – “choose overalls for the love of Jesus”, would live the same problems as their materialistic, irreligious betters. Her conclusion is not just her usual atheist observation that the religious are just as bad as the rest of us and that therefore there is no net gain in religiosity, but that all men in general are dumb. That there is therefore no salvation; no hope of one. Everyone lives as stupidly as everyone else).
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