SIFF Review: Senso, a Story of Two Unlikeable People

A White Tank Top Movie Review

“Senso means ‘sense’ in Italian,” the woman next to me told her friend.  My own research indicates that senso might also be translated as “sentiment,” which would be closer to the feeling of Luchino Visconti’s Senso.  Alternately, the English version, with additional dialogue from Tennessee Williams (!), is more unsubtly called The Wanton Contessa.  

The curtain rises on La Fenice, a gilded Venetian opera house, at the tail end of the Austrian occupation of Italy. The camera glides from the actors performing Il Trovatore to the mix of Austrian officers and Italian nationalists in the audience.  At a particularly moving point, the rebel Italians toss from the balconies red white and green handbills — their fluttering fall makes for a lovely piece of civil disobedience. Martin Scorsese, who supervised the restoration of Senso, clearly had this opening sequence in mind when he filmed the equally operatic beginning of The Age of Innocence.

Read the full review after the jump.

I think the Austrians probably first conquered the Italians with the stylish force of their fabulous uniforms. Their brass-buttoned white jackets and sky blue trousers make them look the part of deserving aristocracy. One such impeccably dressed officer, dripping with contempt at the multicolored display of patriotism, mutters that the Italians would fight “a war of confetti and mandolins.” 

This is Lt. Franz Mahler, played by a suave combination of Farley Granger and a dubbed Italian voice. Granger is great looking, even though it’s strange to see him with red-tinted hair — presumably this makes him look more Austrian. (If you want to see more of him, check out the Seattle Public Library double DVD set of They Live by Night and Side Street, a fantastic pair of noir films.)

It takes Franz about five minutes to charm his way into the heart of Contessa Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli, whose favorite acting technique is opening her eyes as wide as possible). He might be interested in Livia because she looks great under a veil or maybe because her cousin is the leader of the resistance movement in Venice. Indeed, Franz’s manipulations are so transparent that, maybe twenty minutes into the film, I had the thought: is Livia just really dumb? This idea did not go away.  Everyone (her lover, her husband, her cousin, her maid) tells her what to do and say, which makes it hard to root for her.

I admire ambition in directors but Visconti pushes the limits of how much opulence and drama you can squeeze into two plus hours. Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard are good examples of his vision working successfully (one day I hope to learn why he liked to have non-Italian actors center his biggest projects — Frenchman Alain Delon stars in Rocco and Burt Lancaster headlines The Leopard). Where Delon and Lancaster had more effective secondary characters and subplots, Granger and Valli can’t quite bring Senso home by themselves.

One reason is the difficulty in finding a tone for the film. I suppose it’s intended to be high romantic melodrama but, at bottom, it’s a story of two unlikeable people: Franz, a pacifist only as it relates to his self-preservation, and Livia, a committed patriot so long as it doesn’t interfere with her getting laid. In the middle of the film, when Livia is hiding Franz in the closets and granaries of a resistance stronghold, the action is farcical (not to mention enjoyable) and I wish Visconti had kept that mood throughout. Alas, he must conclude with a heavy-handed lesson on loyalty and the poison of inelegant decadence.

Not to say there’s nothing to enjoy — Franz has some great lines like, “I love the smell of ripe wheat.” The audience also got some laughs from the film’s exhaustive subtitling.  “Oh Franz” is translated as “Oh Franz,” in case we were wondering. There are some sweeping, color-saturated shots of soldiers walking through fields with horses inexplicably running through the line of fire. One more thing that looks good but doesn’t quite click.