I’m obsessed. Giancarlo Giannini is incredibly hot and one of the most diabolical, fucked up husbands in cinema as Tulio, a rich/highly upper class Italian, flagrantly cheating on his wife who swallows these poisonous injustices. But when Tulio commits more publicly to his mistress, the widowed and liberated aristocrat, Teresa, the dynamics of his marriage twists into a new and startling shape. As his wife, Giuliana, finds a spark with a well-known, fledgling writer who originally didn’t come from a moneyed background. Visconti never shows the breadth of that affair. There are early moments of their gazes meeting as she realizes he desires her. But instead Visconti focuses on the ripple effects of the affair within the marriage as Tulio…

“L’Innocente” has a gilded statue where its heart should be, and cold gusts of wind instead of blood flowing through its veins. 

The final work of director Luchino Visconti, “L’Innocente” is a farewell to cinema and mannered society that questions the validity for the endurance of both art, and aristocracy. 

The film depicts the entanglements of Tullio Hermil; a wealthy man who neglects his wife in favor of his mistress. He is shown to bear little passion for either woman, or even for the perpetuation of his own self-existence. 

In a career that resurrected fascist opportunists and siblings plotting matricide, Tullio is among the most vile of all Visconti’s screen personages. He carries about his destruction of others’ lives without…

Spoilers in the second-to-last paragraph.

As with much of director Luchino Visconti's work, his final film, The Innocent, is made weighty by the pull of luxurious fabrics: wallpapers; crisply ironed; custom suits; brand new dresses; wraps and veils of the finest silks and furs and tulles. Trapped in the world of the Italian elites, we are first battered and then lulled into passivity by the superficial: bright, flawless surfaces; flashing, false smiles; fur wraps donned to cover up a broken marriage.

In a film so consumed by what is presented to the public, the glimpses we are granted behind the curtain (behind the personal facades) are rare indeed, particularly when they allow us to see into the private lives of…

Luchino Visconti’s production ends just as it started… with a murder. Although there are no murders that are more important than others, it is quite clear that when the victim is a child, our indignation reaches its peak, but Visconti wants our emotional reaction to be mainly triggered by the existential excuses used by the murderer… and, as any person who has ever read either Dickens or a newspaper knows, the murderer always has some kind of justification.
“L’innocente” is based on D’Annunzio novel, which is about… no, wait, this is the wrong approach… D’Annunzio extreme Decadentism was not aimed at justifying the theme of his work… it was the opposite… and the last narrative episode of the novel tried…

In the sublime final work of Luchino Visconti (a great Scorpio), the moral of the story is this: cheating is bad but if you do cheat you should watch your partner actually decide not to end the marriage so she can go on a cheating exploit herself with a person way hotter, also get pregnant by them, and then make you raise this other dudes child. A bit much perhaps, but I suppose this is fair. In all seriousness though, this is quite remarkable - almost fablelike, yet brimming with Visconti's psychological astuteness at its best, and the juxtaposition of the grand opulence of the sets and costumes with the lavish humiliation ritual this guy goes through reminds one of…

"L'Innocente" or "The Innocent" is a 1976 film directed by Luchino Visconti. This film is last film Visconti, released the same year of his death, actually premiering after he had passed. Set in the late 1800's the film takes place within the Roman Aristocracy which central character Tullio Hermil inserting himself in the context of a love turmoil. Being openly unfaithful to his wife, even to her knowledge he finds himself playing to the bids of his mistress. He also expresses his further love to his wife but within an estranged "sisterly" sense has he has respect on how she keep his household. Tulio's wife Giuliana seems muted and passive in conversation with him, but then the situation grows quite…

Aqui está, em primeiríssima mão, gentileza do Rafael Dornellas, o texto do Paul Vecchiali sobre a versão francesa mutilada de La prima notte di quiete, que é na realidade um texto sobre Cronaca familiare, e mais precisamente um pequeno tratado sobre a situação e a posição específica do Zurlini no contexto do cinema italiano do pós-guerra.

E, também por gentileza do Rafael, o texto do Vecchiali sobre L'innocente, do qual colarei uns trechos abaixo:

Sempre atrasados por pelo menos dois filmes, os detratores de Visconti acabaram por admitir que a exuberância do décor, o aparato da disposição em imagens e o refinamento da dramaturgia são sempre acompanhados, profundamente, por uma análise político-social do universo fechado no qual as personagens se…

Absolutely splendorous! A legendary Italian auteur, distinguishable from beginning to end, culminates his impressive body of work with the ideas that he first developed in Senso (1954) all the way through Il Gattopardo (1963) and Ludwig (1973). This swayingly conceived drama strips down the superficial pompousness and lavishness of the Italian turn-of-the-Century aristocracy, revealing the group of social conventionalisms as a mask of hypocrisies in a web of treasons, irrational passions and disgusting self-interests. An impeccable direction highlights the main thematic intention of Visconti since the 60s, that is, to construct a cinema of contrasts: romance vs. affairs, lies vs. truths, secrets vs. confessions, atheism vs. God (both inclinations ironically sustained by the protagonist in different points of the story),…

It’s strange that this would be one of the lesser known and harder-to-find Visconti films because it’s certainly one of the Viscontiest. His lavish, ornamental aesthetic has never been more fully realized than it is here, and his favorite themes of infidelity, decadence and the moral bankruptcy of the upper classes are pursued with an especially pitiless vigor. 

As with so many of his later films, the question of Visconti’s “queer sensibility” is hard to disentangle from his Marxian penchant for self-indictment, given that his own lifestyle wasn’t all that dissimilar to that of his louche anti-hero, Tullio (here played with bewitching bad-boy aplomb by the never-sexier Giancarlo Giannini). On the surface, the anti-elitist politics of the film seem obvious.…