Review of Senso by Visconti

I have recently been taking an Italian language class. It has reinvigorated my desire to watch Italian films. I searched for sometime for recent Italian films but didn't find any to my liking on Hulu.com. What I did find is what I'm going to write about, Senso by Luchino Visconti. This is an epic, historical film. It aspires to be something like Selznick's Gone With the Wind, but comes up short. It is more of a study of illicit love between an Italian Aristocrat and an Austrian Liutenant. The love affair is doomed from the start. The character of the Austrian soldier is executed at the end of the film. Thus, the Italian Lady gets her revenge on the unfaithful soldier.

What could have been a larger themed story about occupation and unification in Italy becomes a personal story about an Aristocratic Lady who can't refuse her forbidden lover. Time and again he mistreats her. Throughout the film I kept asking why does she go back to him? Just when you think she is over him she breaks down and takes him back. It is a tragic story of betrayal. Of being used by someone whom you know you shouldn't trust.

The climax of the story is when the Italian Aristocratic Lady makes a surprise visit to her Austrian lover. She finds him living a life of luxury and in bed with a prostitute. A fight ensues. She leaves, then turns him for faking his sickness. At the end he is executed for desertion.

The story presents the Austrian soldiers as brutes. There is no sympathy left for the soldier. He seduces the rich woman, uses her for her money, then totally alienates her. I liked the staging of the war scenes. The conflict between the Lady and the soldier intensifies as the war between Italy and Austria intensifies. For an Italian production that doesn't have the big budgets of Hollywood, the staging was grand. It shows soldiers fighting, calvary charging, canons being fired, and Generals giving orders. It really gives a dramatic depiction of Italy's quest for unification.

It is these scenes and rising intensity that cause me to compare it to Gone With the Wind. Both are set during conflict and both depict lovers who are not meant for each other. I also derive another comparison within the history of Italian Cinema. If Visconti is Aristocratic and Romantic, then I suppose his opposite is De Sica who portrayed extremely personal stories of very ordinary people. I haven't studied much of Visconti except from Scorsese's My Voyage to Italy, but De Sica and Visconti are opposites, yet both in the era of Neo-realism.