Senso

Plot synopsis:
Senso is set in Italy around 1866 the year the Italian-Austrian war of unification would see the Veneto and most of Friuli-Venezia Giulia united to Italy after the Seven Weeks' War between Austria on one side and Prussia and Italy on the other. The story opens in the La Fenice opera house in Venice during a performance of Il Trovatore. At the close of Manrico's rousing aria Di quella pira, the opera is interrupted by a boisterous protest by Italian Nationalists against the occupying Austrian troops present in the theater. Livia Serpieri, an Italian countess, unhappily married to a stuffy older aristocrat, bears witness to this and tries to conceal the fact that her cousin Marquis Roberto Ussoni has organized the protest. During the commotion, she meets a dashing young Austrian Officer named Franz Mahler, and is instantly smitten with him. The two begin a secret love affair. Despite the fact that Franz was responsible for sending Roberto into exile for his radical behavior, Livia vainly pretends not to be aware of it.
Although Franz is obviously using Livia for her money and social status, Livia throws herself into an affair of complete sexual abandon with Franz, giving away her money and not caring what society thinks about her. But soon, Franz begins failing to show up for their trysts and Livia becomes consumed by jealousy and paranoia. The war finally forces the lovers apart, with Livia's husband taking her away to their villa in the country in order to avoid the carnage. Late one night, Franz arrives on the estate, and secrets himself into Livia's bedroom. He asks her for more money to bribe the army doctors into keeping away from the battlefield; Livia complies, giving away all of the money she was holding for Roberto, who intended to supply it to the partisans fighting the Austrians. Livia's betrayal leads to tragic consequences; the Austrians overwhelm the under-equipped Italians.
Eventually, Livia is almost driven mad by the fact that she's unable to see Franz, but rejoices when a letter from him finally arrives. In the letter, Franz thanks Livia for the financial support that helped him stay away from the front. He advises Livia not to look for him, but she does not listen. As soon as possible, Livia, still grasping the letter, boards a carriage and hurries to Verona to find her lover. Once there, Livia makes her way to the apartment, which she herself has rented for Franz. What she finds is a drunken, self-loathing rogue, in the company of a young prostitute, openly mocking Livia for accepting his abuse.
After forcing her to sit and drink with the prostitute, Franz brutally throws Livia out of his rooms. She finds herself in the streets, filled with drunken, amorous Austrian soldiers. Livia realizes that she still has Franz's letter, but nothing remains now except mutual self-destruction. Her sanity slipping, Livia heads to the headquarters of the Austrian Army, where she hands Franz's letter to a General, thereby convicting Franz of treason. Although the General sees that Livia is acting out of spite for being cuckolded, he is forced to comply and Franz is executed by firing squad. Livia, now insane, runs off into the night, crying out her lover's name.

Tags: revenge, romantic, melodrama

Review:
Wonderful movie, and quite unexpected at the time from the neorealist Visconti, finally letting some of the operatic juice flow into his film work.
It's also the first of his explorations of Italian history and social change, to be followed by The Leopard and the fantastic Rocco and His Brothers.One caveat: At a screening a couple of years ago at MoMA, I learned that it was the Italian government that was responsible for the snipping of some crucial scenes near the end of Senso, depicting the Battle of Custozza.
Poor Visconti tended to make long movies, and often had trouble getting them shown at the proper length in the US, but this time it was his own government that stymied him!As for the rest: Granger is fine, but it's Valli who gives one of the all-time great move star performances.
The married Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) sees her cousin challenging the Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) for a duel in the opera and being arrested and sent to the exile for one year.
The "red noble" Luchino Visconti is one of the best directors ever and this masterpiece explores a wonderful, cruel and tragic romance in times of the Italian "El Risorgimento".
The story is fantastic, with a gorgeous Alida Valli in the top of her beauty, and Farley Granger splendid as a scum lover.
Whatever Anton Bruckner had in mind when writing his majestic Seventh Symphony, it probably wasn't as the score to a postwar Italian love story set during the Italian-Austrian conflicts of the Risorgiamento.
(Digression: After a handful of American films -- They Live by Night, Rope, Side Street, Strangers on a Train -- Granger journeyed to Italy to work with Visconti then fell off the screen for years, only to resurface in a few schlock films in the late 60s and early 70s.
Nonetheless this aesthetically beautiful film still stands out as a fine ironic masterpiece.The year is 1866 and the moment people have dreamed for decades - centuries - is in our hands.
In the middle of all this Visconti tells us a story about an Italian woman, who is the cousin of the leader of the underground resistance, who falls in love with an Austrian lieutenant.
She is blinded by her romantic illusion and is ready to betray her family, friends, ideals and native land - these are part of the ethical problematics in Senso.Senso was Visconti's first color film and he obviously had put a lot of effort to it.
The opening sequence shows us the basic power of Opera and melodrama - to change life, infrastructure without forgetting the concrete history.Historical films always tell us about two different ages, intentionally or unintentionally: the one the story takes place in and the time it was made in.
But also about the downside; the victory of the right-wingers and the beginning of the Cold War.Senso is a gorgeous film which requires patience and love from its viewer.
Opens with a lush rendition of Il Trovatore at Teatro La Fenice, SENSO is an ostentatious melodrama imprinted with Visconti's pronounced blue blood opulence, retells an Italian countess' (Valli) vain and poignant attempt to pursue her one-sided affection to an Austrian officer (Granger shines in the rich Technicolor palette as an Adonis), whose misogyny and promiscuity will cause his own doom and mar her mentality up to the hilt.
The film sets its time during the fall of Austrian occupation in Venezia 1866, Valli is wavering between her bureaucratic husband (Moog) and rioting cousin (Girotti), to break loose from the stalemate, she irrevocably falls for a young lieutenant in the opponent camp, but he is no knight in shining armor but a foul and spineless scoundrel with irresistible sheen of deadly charm.
Valle shoulders on a profound effort to scrutinize a woman's inscrutable sexual desire which being repressed for too long, both she and Granger align themselves with Visconti's brimful-of- emotion style (again, thanks to Techincolor and the overstuffed score as well) which approximate the OTT threshold in certain degree, although falling out with Visconti eventually, Granger succeeds in bringing about his best screen persona and it was such a great era when a gay man can play an outright straight womanizer on the celluloid.On the one hand SENSO fails to impress me as my favorite among Visconti's work of art, and scale-wise pales by comparison with LUDWIG (1972, 8/10) and THE LEOPARD (1963, 8/10), but on the other hand, only Visconti can flaunt such an overbearing melodrama with true mettle and without any compromise, a trend-setter would inspire later kindred spirits, for instance Baz Luhrmann's 3D adaption of the bourgeois sumptuosity THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, 8/10)..
Having only seen Alida Valli in her English language films where she often seemed stiff and ill at ease her performance here is quite a revelation.
This has to be one of my all time old favorite Romantic Motion Picture.Visconti brings about Magic and beauty onscreen making every shot a glamour in experience!There are so many great moments in Senso that it will take you ages before this Picture wears out in your memory.Besides the fact that Visconti is one of the great Film-makers of all times it has to be said that this Director simply had a feel about shots to form a scene to imprint that exact emotion or feeling that was intended by him.
But, it's also a great example of a film which suffers because the main characters are complete moral degenerates and are therefore difficult to relate to or care for during the course of the movie.This film is set around the time of the Italian independence movement in the late 1860s and into the early 1870s.
In fact, at one point, she makes herself a traitor by giving the lover money which was gathered to support the Italian army...and all for love (or at least what this whore thinks is love).While many reviewers seemed to like this film, I couldn't get past the characters.
This beautifully photographed  romance features a great performance by Alida Valli, and Farley Granger in the greatest role of his career.
Alida Valli plays a love starved married woman who falls passionately in love with deserter Granger.
The camera stays back, wide angle, and doesn't lend much of a hand with the narrative, leaving the players to communicate with exaggerated gesture.A married Venetian countess falls for a young Austrian army officer - we know from the first scene that he is an utter cad, but she doesn't  or rather she does, but being a one dimensional clinging woman she is bound to hurl herself into disastrous folly.
Along the way, there's the approaching end of Austrian rule of northern Italy and some slight comment on the collaboration of senior Venetian figures  but that point seems hardly worth making after all this time.
That ridicules everybody (...or does it?).Funnily enough, the main problem is Alida Valli, who is required to over-emote in every scene (in total contrast to her depressive role in "The Third Man")  it's a little unpleasant to watch and she soon begins to annoy.
Luchino Visconti was first of all an opera director, and this was his most opera-like film.
The film actually begins with an opera performance at the Phoenix Theatre in Venice 1866 with the dramatic climax of Verdi's "Il trovatore", which sets the film flourishing from the start - the opening scenes are cinematographically the best of the whole film, but the realism is absolute all the way in every detail and just worth seeing over and over again for that.
Countess Serpieri (Alida Valli), a Venetian aristocrat married to an older man, falls suddenly deeply in love with an Austrian army officer, Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) who is however nothing more than a philanderer, a crook and a coward who ends up by deserting his army based on a fake and obtained through bribery medical report stating that he is physically unfit for the army.
The only flaw of this movie in my opinion is the performance of Farley Granger a wrong choice for the role of Franz Mahler.
'Senso' directed by Italian master Luchino VIsconti marked his first departure from neo-realism.
Right from the first shot to the final one, the film remains colourful and visually vibrant which is enhanced by Visconti and his cinematographer's exquisite framing and compositions.
These movies generally were melodramas with a female protagonist having to go through tough times and even tragedies for the sake of love and romance.
Livia betraying her rebel cousin Roberto just for the sake of her love/lust for the Austrian officer Franz has to symbolise the rich, upper class and the aristocracy turning their back on the ideals and ideology of the nationalist movement.
There are mirrors visible in many shots of the film and there is a scene where Franz actually talks about how he likes to look at himself in the mirror to see whether he is still the man that he was earlier.
But in the end, she gets a taste of her own medicine when Franz becomes nothing short of a mirror image of her own betrayal and selfishness.In a film where the main characters aren't the most likable, the actors have to really rise to the top and make the characters really interesting.
'Senso' wouldn't completely work without Alida Valli's brilliantly emotive performance.'Senso' is a lavish, sprawling, epic romance with a political subtext.
I really didn't expected this movie to be in color but it luckily was, since it truly added a lot to the overall experience.It's a visually spectacular movie to look at, also since it is being placed at an interesting time period.
The movie is set in the late 19th century, during one of the many wars, this time between Austria and Italy.
This film follows much the same plot, except 1) There is no full blown sex orgy in which a conga line is led by a woman in stockings and suspenders and Nazi uniform carrying a large golden dildo and 2) It's not set during the same era but during the time of the Italian unification; 1866, Garibaldi and all that.
So the Italians are fighting to oust the Austrian empire from the northern states and secure independence.The countess has a cousin fighting for the Italian cause, so her adultery is a double betrayal.Watchable stuff and interesting to compare with the Brass effort, which although a load of cobblers did have some lovely cinematography and shots of Venice in it.
A troubled and neurotic Italian Countess (Alida Valli) betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian Lieutenant (Farley Granger).Originally, Visconti had hoped to cast Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando in the lead roles, but Bergman was not interested in the part, and Brando was nixed by the producers who considered Granger a bigger star, at the time.
If only Visconti had been able to graft a small bit of his working class affinities by showing a bit more of the struggles of the Italian Resistance, Senso may have hurdled that bar.
This magnificent operatic drama deserves being restored to full color and released on DVD.Warning - spoiler ahead.From the beginning, at a performance of Il Trovatore, the film follows a grande passionate story of love, betrayal and revenge.
A production of Giuseppe Verdi's "Il trovatore" is on display, director Luchino Visconti hinting that his film will likewise be a sumptuous opera, with big emotions, unashamed melodrama and lavish costumes.The opera is then interrupted by a demonstration, a group of radical "Italian Patriots" protesting the occupying Austrian army.
On the surface, the story is about an Italian woman called Livia who finds herself growing apart from her complacent husband (an aristocratic opportunist) and drawn toward an Austrian character called Franz Mahler, but what Visconti is really interested in is demythologising the Italian Risorgimento, the political and social movement which led to the unification of Italy's states.One must remember that Visconti was influenced by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
And so when the performers in the opera that opens the film chant "All'armi, all'armi!" ("To arms, to arms!"), it's no surprise that the patriots in the audience and the Italian aristocrats in the boxes take up the chant and unfurl the Italian flag, much to the fright of occupying Austrian officers.
More than this, the film uses the romantic decline and decay between a pair of lovers (one Italian, one Austrian) to show how identities shift.
Not only is this romantic love based in a materiality which is income based and class based, but nationalistic love is itself a kind of parasitic thing, Franz and Livia's selfish romance, collapse and separation echoing Italy's love affair with and rejection of the Austrian Empire.Of course, the film is also implicitly about the era in which it was made.
After WW2, Italy was busy trying to distance itself from Nazi Germany, and was in the process of making sense of the literal and psychic rubble of the war and in search of a new national identity.So what's most interesting about the film is the way it fits in with "The Damned", "Ludwig", "Death In Venice" and "The Leopard", other films by Visconti about European nationalism, and all of which form a clear "progression".
However, films like "The Damned" also show that Visconti was interested in the limits of nationalism and the dead end which it ultimately leads to at a structural level within society.
Stylistically, though Visconti loves his rich cinematography, his lavish rooms and costumes, the film is very stiff, very dialogue based.
Like many of Visconti's colour films, "Senso" plays like a glorified stage production or Victorian novel.Worth one viewing..
For some reason Visconti's early film Senso (1954) eluded me until recently.
The basic story is a tortured potboiler about a passionate, affection-starved Countess, Livia played brilliantly by Alida Valli, and her completely delusional infatuation with a first class cad, a Lieutenant in the Austiran army occupying Venice in the 19th century.
It seems a bit long about 90 minutes in with 30 minutes to go but it picks up as Alida Valli's character slowly shreds in the final scenes.If you're longing to start a love affair with someone you just met I cannot recommend this film.
The photography and Alida Valli's magnificent performance are reasons enough to see this important Italian film.I deduct one star for the Bruckner and another for the homogenized Farley Granger voice- over..
This may have been Visconti's first attempt at the period drama, but he handles it with such grace you wouldn't be able to tell.Of course no film is complete without story and characters, of which this film does not excel at, but certainly handles correctly.
Valli's and Granger's characters are two incredibly self-loathing people, and they're entirely responsible for their own downfall.Overall, I would certainly recommend "Senso" for anyone interested in Visconti, period dramas, or both.
Cain's sweaty tale of blue-collar adultery and murder, 'The Postman Always Rings Twice'.Maria Callas had been Visconti's first choice for the part of Countess Livia Serpieri - a society wife who becomes infatuated with good-looking creep Lieutenant Franz Mahler (played in a gleaming white uniform by an obviously dubbed Farley Granger) - but had too many theatre commitments (even at the projected three months that the film was expected to take to shoot, which eventually took nine months to complete).
The distinguished Italian cameraman G.R.Aldo was killed in a car crash during the filming of this, his first colour production; and the opening scene in Venice's Fenice Theatre is the work of his successor Robert Krasker, who himself walked out on the production after falling out with Visconti, leaving the film to be completed by Giuseppe Rotunno.
By the 1970s Visconti could finally make a film truer to his own inclinations in 'Death in Venice' (1971), with Dirk Bogarde - once the object of infatuation himself in 'The Sleeping Tiger', but now the one smitten - in a production again dressed up to the nines, handsomely set in period, again using beautiful Venetian locations and this time almost entirely dispensing with dialogue in favour of Mahler, his favourite composer; whose name he had co-opted for the young officer in 'Senso' (who had been called Remigio Ruz in Camillo Boito's original novella)..
In this film, Visconti not only brought a lavish attention to historical detail, but he also put forward the ideologically challenging idea that human erotic passions (in particular, Alida Valli's grand passion) could take center stage and even upstage the unfolding of Il Risorgimento, the series of wars that Italians celebrate as laying the foundation for the creation of the Italian State.
This is an Italian film I found in the pages of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I didn't know what to expect, I just hoped it would be worthy of its placement, directed by Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard).
Basically set in the spring of 1866, during the last days of the Austrian occupation and the Third Italian War of Independence, the unhappily married Countess Livia Serpieri (The Third Man's Alida Valli) witnesses her cousin Marquis Roberto Ussoni (Massimo Girotti) organising a protest.
Roberto challenges the dashing young Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Rope's Farley Granger) to a duel at the La Fenice opera house in Venice, Roberto is arrested and sent to the exile for one year.
But Valli proves a good choice as the countess used by a cavalry officer, well played by Granger, I could just about follow the story whilst having to read the subtitles, it is essentially a doomed romance going against country and social class, it may have been slow and predictable in places, but overall it is an interesting melodrama.