October 14: Senso (1954 -- Luchino Visconti)

★★★★

When I think of Visconti, I think of rich visuals, and that’s right on the money with Senso.  The film starts in the gilded La Fenice, replete with candle light and lavish mid-1800s costumes, and then it moves out to sweeping views of Venetian plazas and canalways that Livia walks along as Visconti paints the stained walls with light.  Some shots resemble a David Lean image with a small figure slowly moving through a large landscape.  

The personal interiors are no less impressive.  Livia’s homes have classical staircases and frescoes, which themselves add interest and content to the film, and her bedrooms are furnished with swags of cloth, rich upholstery, and ornate items.  Throughout, mirrors expand the space in the frame while creating more visual interest.   There’s a similar attention to detail, though of a different sort, with respect to Franz.  While Livia’s rooms are always rich, tasteful and arranged, Franz’s quarters are usually simple and disorderly, as at the military barracks.  When Franz has his own apartment, it’s furnished with items that seem slightly crass and are tossed about in a haphazard manner, visual indications of the difference in background between him and Livia.  In fact, Visconti’s attention to detail in Senso goes beyond finding props appropriate for the characters and into the settings being expressions of the characters.  In the way he uses the settings of the film to develop the characters rather than merely reflect them, Visconti reminds me of Soderbergh in Erin Brockovitch and Magic Mike. The settings in all these films communicate information that's important to the characters rather than simply being suitable.

Not only does Visconti’s camera love the public and private spaces, but it also lingers appreciatively on his actors.  At La Fenice, Alida Valli looks like an impossibly perfect statue that moves as she wears her stiff, gauzy wrap, and Farley Granger’s impeccable white uniform shows not a wrinkle or a stain.  The two move like characters from a dream.  Later, we see them in more intimate surroundings, slightly disheveled and lounging comfortably or touching while the camera positions us as part of the intimacy.  This cinematography, too, keeps us involved with the two protagonists.

All the intimacy and beauty in Senso make its terrible characters doubly shocking.  Franz is a ladies’ man and a con from early on.  While we share Livia’s initial trust and attraction to him, we soon begin to have doubts as we find he’s lied about having her cousin Roberto exiled and, when he tosses her lock of hair in order to pawn its expensive container, we have real doubts.  He’s soon missing their rendez-vous, and we realize he’s not interested in her.  Livia, however, doesn’t, and it’s at this point that we begin to sense something amiss with her, too.  Her love for Franz becomes so obsessive that she ignores society, nationality, politics and even family in her pursuit of him.  When he makes a gallant appearance at her countryside estate, she even gives him the money entrusted to her by Roberto to fund the partisan resistance to the Austrians.  The low point of her self-debasement, and his abuse of her, comes when she flees to his apartment and he reproaches her, telling her how he’s been using her before throwing her out.  Furious, she denounces his evasion of military service, and he’s executed.  There is little in these two characters to match the beauty of their surroundings.

With such extremity, it’s not hard to see opera in the background of Senso.  The film starts in an opera house, and the intense, one-dimensional emotions have an operatic feel.  Much of the movie is over-the-top, from the military battles through the ornate scenery and the stakes for the lovers.  And the film is touching in the way opera can be, too, with its heightened sense of love and dark betrayal leading to death and madness.