|
The opening is indicative of the fluency at play, the heroine dashes past the camera while running out the door and up the plaza steps, long shot to close-up to long shot in one unbroken movement. She (Françoise Christophe) is a Roman architect contemplating her reflection in a decisive instant, mirror or painting or lens? "I am trying to stick a soul behind this face... and the poor thing wants a picture." Her fiancé cannot possibly compete with the dashing orchestra conductor (Pierre Cressoy), Tchaikovsky is the soundtrack of passion, "una vita intensa" is the shared goal. Their Amalfi interlude is a dream that inevitably dissipates, autonomy has its price. "Regret the past, trust the future, never be satisfied with the present," an artist's maxim versus a roué's come-on. Vittorio Cottafavi's Madame Bovary or, rather, his Daisy Kenyon, a masterly merging of overflowing feelings and what the musician calls "linee esatte." Having just escaped the advances of a smarmy banker, the protagonist seeks refuge at a café only to be virtually mistaken for a streetwalker. Her homes carry thematic resonance, as befits her trade, the curtailed engagement is an unfinished construction site and the marriage to the stolid gent (Gino Cervi) "a modern house with old furniture." She ends up back at the family abode she once fled, replacing her ailing mother (Elisa Cegani) and protecting her younger sister (Christine Carère). Ray's Born to Be Bad for the clique of aesthetes, with "Noi Non Esistiamo" on a banner during the shindig thrown by the "anti-existentialist" painter (Galeazzo Benti), cf. Donen's Funny Face. It builds to a pistol between lovers, "we're completely inside a melodrama. At its climax!" The concluding stretto is possibly Cottafavi's greatest sequence, a succession of shots nearly as staggering in their emotive geometry as Hitchcock's at the finale of Notorious. With Lianella Carell, Barbara Florian, Augusto Mastrantoni, Luigi Tosi, Nada Cortese, and Mario Maldesi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |