By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
Filming what many consider his apotheosis, The Leopard (TSPDT #71), Luchino Visconti landed on the theme that would occupy him for the remainder of his career: the imminent obsolescence of his own class, the aristocracy. In his follow-up to The Leopard Visconti revisits the Italian upper class in their crumbling modern environs, following the titular expatriate (Claudia Cardinale) and her American husband on a return trip to the family estate. Ghosts of the past take form in the suspected murder of Sandra’s father by her mother and her lover, the family lawyer, and the incestuous desires of her estranged brother, compelling her to turn her family reunion into a series of ugly confrontations. Cardinale lends furrow-browed intensity to the most challenging role of her career, but her attempts at seriousness are undermined by Visconti’s puzzling insistence to shoot her in as titillating a manner as possible, lingering on her cleavage, legs and bare back, reducing her to an arthouse Brigitte Bardot. Combined with her brother’s anguished caterwauling, the affair risks being undermined by unintentional camp, sogged by the same hysteria that pushes Rocco and His Brothers (TSPDT #185) over the top. Visconti would do more interesting things with this undercurrent of self-parody in his later films; at best this is a puzzling transitional work, with outstanding gothic atmospherics to recommend it, courtesy of an outstanding antique villa for a set that speaks hushed volumes on its own._____________________________________
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