L'Innocente

L'Innocente, a 1976 release, was Luchino Visconti's last film. Based on a novel, it's a stately and sudsy costume melodrama, that only maintains the viewer's interest because of Visconti's skill with the camera.

Set presumably in the late nineteenth century among Italian aristocrats, the story focuses on three characters: Giancarlo Giannini, who is married to Laura Antonelli, but also has a mistress Jennifer O'Neill. We find out quickly that Giannini is the worst kind of cad, as he calmly tells Antonelli that he thinks of her as a sister, and that O'Neill is the only woman who has made him feel such deep and passionate love. Antonelli takes this passively, resorting to taking massive amounts of sleeping pills. She ends up meeting a novelist and she has an affair with him. Giannini becomes disaffected with O'Neill and falls in love with his wife all over again (which allows Antonelli to appear in the buff, a speciality of hers). But when she gets pregnant Giannini realizes he's been cuckolded, as he hadn't slept with her in years.

All of this plays like an afternoon serial, especially after the baby is born and Giannini goes off his nut. But Visconti keeps reins on the proceedings, and his use of color, light and the framing of his shots make the film so visually interesting that one keeps watching even if the action is ludicrous.

The acting is not so great. Antonelli was something of a soft-core porn actress, and O'Neill, a former model who was briefly famous in the seventies, is pretty stiff (I don't know if she's speaking Italian or if her lines were dubbed). Giannini comes across like the poor man's Marcello Mastroianni, and throughout much of the film his eyes are rheumy.

For connoisseurs of Italian cinema, this film will be an interesting view, but beyond that it's not a masterpiece of any kind.