Though a pair of high-wattage actors—Alida Valli and Farley Granger—play the lead roles in Luchino Visconti’s 1954 historical melodrama, “Senso” (sumptuously restored by Criterion), the movie’s real star is Italy itself. The tale of illicit desire, set in the midst of the Risorgimento, features Valli as a Venetian countess who works with the Italian underground against the Austrian occupation but betrays the cause when she falls in love with a romantic young Austrian officer (Granger).
Visconti, working for the first time with the rich, painterly hues of Technicolor, sets the mood with the first scene, which takes place in Venice’s opera house La Fenice, where a performance of “Il Trovatore” provides the backdrop for both political agitation and erotic maneuvering. The riotous ornamentation, the architectural grandeur, and the dramatic costumes—on both sides of the footlights—make for a tinderbox of passions, as do the city’s luminous canals and splendid plazas and the gaudily bedizened villas of town and countryside alike. The movie’s title means “sense,” which, in Visconti’s view, is exactly what the overheated Italian manner burns away, letting primal emotions trump sophistication.
The director’s exacting eye for color, detail, and framing conveys even more turmoil than his actors do. In an informative DVD extra, Caterina D’Amico (the daughter of Visconti’s co-writer, Suso Cecchi D’Amico) explains the director’s “desire to have to dig for emotions and sensations—not to have them blurted out in some blatant way but relishing the pleasure of searching for them.” The feelings with which Visconti imbues “Senso” are not solely his own or those of his characters; they belong to Italian history.
Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” (Focus Features) also puts location at the heart of a drama. It’s the story of a Los Angeles-based movie star, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), who comes to recognize—in the course of a few weeks spent with his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning)—his emotional estrangement from both his family and his work. Shielded from life by a set of cocoons—the Chateau Marmont, his black Ferrari, a splendid Milan hotel, a Las Vegas casino, the movie studio—Johnny grasps the wider world as pure visual experience, from which gleams of self-aware enlightenment quietly arise. Coppola’s still, tense images capture a vast, deeply submerged realm of powerful feelings that the unmoored and sybaritic Johnny only vents without being able to harness—a realm which, she suggests, is not just an L.A. state of mind but the essence of the cinema itself. ♦
