L'Innocente

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): ****

Directed by Luchino Visconti.

Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) is a wealthy, handsome Italian aristocrat who believes (and shades of Dosteovsky must be intentional here) that he leads a free, full life. For him, this means abjuring conventional social attachments, especially religious ones. He has been married for years to a beautiful, seemingly docile woman. But, having cut himself off from social obligation, and having no temperament for the life of an ascetic, the only way he knows to feel alive is through the passion and agony of romantic affairs. This life has served him well enough, and he thinks he knows all about how to live fully.

When he tells his wife of his affairs and, in essence, declares an open relationship, he is completely unprepared for the consequences. That once sweet agony of jealousy and desire turns to true agony when his wife takes another lover. Losing control, his familiar veneer of enlightened individualism falls away to reveal a manipulative, possessive monster.

There is an old, well known dichotomy in film theory. It was first articulated by early Russian filmmakers, and like most dichotomies it is utterly false but also tantalizingly true. Some filmmakers are like painters: they lavish attention over each scene as if they'd slaved over it for months, with impeccable composition, expert use of light and shadow and color. In the best of these films, every shot is a subtle story in itself. On the other hand you have filmmakers who emphasize the "modern" element of film -- that thing which decisively differentiates it from other visual media: editing (or, as it's usually named, "montage").

Although in some ways it is more false than true, it would be fair to say that Luchino Visconti tends strongly toward the painterly style of filmmaking. L'innocente is a perfect example of this. It passes before you in a series of lush, exquisite tableaux. But unlike most filmmakers of this stripe, this is not a beautiful façade; the aesthetic is somehow mysteriously intertwined with the very real story which the film tells.

Visconti himself was an aristocrat, and his later films feel oddly unfamiliar. There is a long tradition in movies: films about aristocrats are always backdrops for class-based social and economic commentary. This is certainly not true in Visconti's later work. It is precisely when he turns away from neo-realism that his films become achingly personal. He portrays the world he lived in or the lost world he clearly mourned. So Visconti has this very rare ability to make stories of the aristocracy that are not about the aristocracy as such. In fact, in movies like L'Innocente and Death in Venice, a peasant such as myself is struck by how universal the themes and the stories are -- as long as you remove any thought of material necessity and make everything (and everyone) almost impossibly beautiful.

L'innocente is a beautiful, thought-provoking film. Though it lacks some of the emotional subtlety of a masterpieces like Death in Venice and The Leopard (in particular, the final scene seems slightly contrived, at least by Visconti's standards), it certainly is a searching, honest and refreshingly subtle exploration of how a person can choose to live one's life.