Truly Dreadful Film

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Absolutely the worst movie.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

"L'Innocente" is a pretty film to watch. This can be said for just about all the films of Luchino Visconti that I have seen. He really knew how to make a quality film--great sets, lovely costumes and nice cinematography. However, I will also say that I hardly ever have enjoyed a Visconti film (with the exception of "Rocco and His Brothers" and perhaps one or two others). While they look great, they also move at a glacial place and feature characters I really couldn't care less for...and this makes for very slow viewing. Artsy folks and critics LOVE films like "The Leopard", "The Damned" and "Death in Venice", I just found them to be overlong and curiously uninvolving.I could say all this about Visconti's final film, "L'Innocente"-- a film that once again looks great but also have no one in the film that you care one bit about as well as glacial pacing. Even the sight of an incredibly beautiful naked woman in some incredibly graphic scenes weren't enough to make the film interesting-- something that is VERY difficult to achieve. I could talk about the story, but frankly it COULD have been interesting...but wasn't. My only thrill came at the end when one of the characters killed themselves...at least then I knew it was finally complete!

Luchino Visconti is one of my favorite directors. I think Death in Venice is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. This film begins with the credits shown over a book with its pages being turned by a hand reminding me of Jeanne Cocteau's beginning for Beauty and the Beast (1946). Tullio (Giancarlo Gianni) is an aristocrat married to Laura Antonelli but he fools around shamelessly with Jennifer O'Neil. He's a bullshit artist at high speed, but one day he gets his come-uppance. He seems not to care about Antonelli's feelings, and one day she cheats on him with a novelist/writer. She is left pregnant, and Tullio is devastated. He cannot accept the child (who all thinks is his own). Visconti's films always have a certain disdain for rich people, and here his contempt is risen to art while telling a very engaging story. Gianni's performance is powerful stuff, while Antonelli is both beautiful and sad in equal measures. Not as good as Death in Venice but excellent nonetheless.

Visconti's final film is a brutally beautiful masterpiece. As ever, the film is fetishistic in its attention to detail (witness the scene in which the two leads are having sex and the camera spends ages examining Luara Antonelli's exquisite shoes, bodice and stockings).Giancarlo Giannini and Antonelli play a married couple whose pleasure and displeasure at each other's extramarital affairs border on the masochistic.Giannini, the macho man whose personal moral code allows him not only to take a lover but to tell his wife in great detail about his lustings for his lover, is terrifying as the husband unable to choose between his wife and his lover, hurting both and eventually pleasing neither. But it is often overlooked that Antonelli, whose acting roles prior to 'L'innocente', featured such greats as 'Dr. Goldfoot and the Sex Bombs' and 'The Eroticist', startles as a woman who, although on first glance is 'more sinned against than sinning' but is equally manipulative and sadistic in her relationship with her husband, toying with him as he furiously attempts to make her admit to her indiscretions.

After this film is over, you'll probably feel that you've just seen a quality movie for serious movie-goers. But while you're watching it, you may find yourself thinking than it needed a shot of adrenalin. It's an elegant and insightful drama, but very languidly paced. Apparently, everybody involved with it tried to give the (rather soapy) material more weight than it could hold, so almost everything - direction, acting, dialogue rhythms - seems kind of overdeliberate. Great last shot, though. (**1/2)