Tag Archives: Elio Petri

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A Quiet Place in the Country

A Quiet Place in the Country
A Quiet Place in the Country

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of Elio Petri: The Forgotten Genius at the ICA, London

Screening date: 11 September 2014

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Elio Petri, Tonino Guerra, Luciano Vincenzoni

Cast: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Gabriella Grimaldi

Original title: Un tranquillo posto in campagna

Italy 1968

106 mins

Whenever Franco Nero is asked about Elio Petri, his heartfelt appreciation for the director he worked with only once in his career, performing one of his most demanding roles, is as poignant as it is powerful: ‘Elio Petri is the greatest Italian director of the past, the only Italian director who made 10 films that were completely different from one another.’

This unqualified praise is certainly confirmed by A Quiet Place in the Country, Petri’s foray into experimental horror. It’s a film that demands repeated viewing as it is all too easy to get engrossed in the intricacies of the delirious plot. Once you know how this flamboyantly elusive tale of a troubled abstract painter obsessed with the ghost of a nymphomaniac young countess pans out, you appreciate all the more how brilliantly it is all set up. Blending sex, love, madness, identity crisis, alienation, death, art, consumerism and social commentary in a hypnotic, dazzling visual swirl of bold colours, powerful emotions and artistic expression, it is a feast of experimental visual imagery, but not without Petri’s typically dry, caustic touch.

Franco Nero stars as Leonardo, the young established painter afflicted with self-doubt and reckless fantasies, and looked after by his art dealer lover Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave). In an effort to help Leonardo overcome a creative crisis, she rents a derelict country house that he feels is the perfect place for him to work. But soon after his arrival, the previous owner of the house claims possession of her property in mysterious and increasingly dangerous ways. Mentally unstable and with a fatal weakness for beautiful women and vivid hallucinations, Leonardo gets more and more obsessed with the tragic story behind the elusive, free-spirited Wanda (Gabriella Grimaldi) and soon finds himself pushed to the limits of reality, myth and sadism.

The film’s original score by Ennio Morricone plays no small part in contributing to the moody, feverish atmosphere created in the film, while Petri, who had a passion for modern art, goes to great pains to illustrate the relation between present and past, in sinister and haunting, rather than nostalgic, manner. Perhaps A Quiet Place in the Country is best seen as a submersion in a dream that unfolds buried layers of unresolved affairs – emotional, sexual or psychological – to alluring and puzzling effect.

This review is part of our KVIFF 2014 coverage.

Pamela Jahn

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The Assassin

The Assassin
The Assassin

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 21 July 2014

Distributor: Arrow Academy

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Elio Petri, Tonino Guerra, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Salvo Randone, Micheline Presle

Original title: L’assassino

Italy 1961

97 mins

There is a small scene in Elio Petri’s The Assassin (L’assassino), which is set on a grey, miserable day in Rome. Two police officers, drenched from the rain and their shoes splattered with mud, enter a house in search of a man who has become the main suspect in a murder case. As the two men walk up the staircase, the concierge shoots out of her flat and scolds them, ‘Hey you, where are going, you’re making everything dirty’. In 1961, shortly before the premiere of the film, the authorities insisted on having this particular scene removed on the grounds that it represented the police in a negative way – according to the censors, the police would never make a hallway dirty.

This review is part of our KVIFF 2014 coverage.

The scene, as minor and negligible as it might seem, not only nearly led to the banning of the film but perfectly illustrates the climate in which Petri shot his impressive and still potent feature debut. Airing his resentment of the moral decay of early 1960s youth and the corruption of Italian society, the film is riddled with a refreshing irony that bears comparison to Kafka and Camus.

Dazzlingly intercutting police interrogation scenes and flashbacks to the night of the crime, The Assassin follows the investigation concerning Alfredo Martelli, a cunning thirty-something Roman antiques dealer accused of having murdered his former business partner and long-term mistress, the wealthy socialite Adalgisa de Matteis (Micheline Presle). As unscrupulous as he may be, Martelli (played by the brilliant Marcello Mastroianni) doesn’t understand what is going on as he is taken to the police station, and any attempt to find out more is met with icy disdain by the officers on duty. When he eventually learns what he is suspected of, he desperately tries to prove his innocence to the equally corrupt inspector in charge (Salvo Randone). With the subtle noir style of its plot and music, combined with Petri’s assured direction, The Assassin plays out as a smartly paced, deftly twisted cat-and-mouse tale that sees Martelli progressively losing his dandy manners as the police’s unorthodox methods grind him down.

Luckily, the above mentioned scene was never cut from the film because Goffredo Lombardo, one of the producers – he remembers the circumstances of the release in the documentary Elio Petri: Notes about a Filmmaker (2005), an extra on the Criterion edition of Investigation – told the censors that he would remove it but then released the film in its original version under the assumption that ‘the authorities would never go to see the film in the cinema anyway.’

Pamela Jahn

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We Still Kill the Old Way

We Still Kill the Old Way
We Still Kill the Old Way

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of Elio Petri: The Forgotten Genius at the ICA, London

Screening date: 9 September 2014

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro

Based on the novel: To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia

Cast: Gian Maria Volonté, Mario Scaccia, Irene Papas

Original title: A ciascuno il suo

Italy 1967

99 mins

Arguably one of his most mordant films, We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) marked a deliberate turn for Elio Petri from the dazzling, super-stylised pop-art adventure he had just embarked upon in The 10th Victim (1965). Written by Petri and Ugo Pirro (a collaboration that lasted until 1973), this austere murder mystery is set in a small village in Mafia-ruled Sicily, a location that allowed Petri to fully realise his aspiration for greater political involvement.

Based on the novel To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia, the story is apt for this purpose: a young, naïve professor (Gian Maria Volonté) gets himself tangled in a web of lies and deceit as he attempts to reveal the truth behind some dubious death threats and the subsequent killing of two men during a hunt. While the police mistakenly believes it to be a crime of passion, Laurana suspects a political conspiracy, but his judgment is obscured by his seething desire for his friend’s widow, played by a wonderfully aloof Irene Papas.

As the plot thickens Laurana’s passion leads to his doom, and Luis Bacalov’s score, based on a distinctive 60s calypso-style rhythm mixed with melancholic piano chords and threatening drums, perfectly matches the increasingly darker, more enigmatic mood. With vivid cinematography, We Still Kill the Old Way is compelling and acrid in equal measure, if not as driven and fierce as some of Petri’s later triumphs such as the Oscar-winning Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion. But although here as in his other films narrative stringency is not his forte, Petri excels once more at creating an infectious atmosphere that draws you right in, is impossible to resist and hard to shake off even long after you step out of his unsettling, expressive world.

This review is part of our KVIFF 2014 coverage.

Pamela Jahn

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The 10th Victim

10th Victim
The 10th Victim

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 10 March 2014

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvioni, Ennio Flaiano, Elio Petri, Ernesto Gastaldi

Based on the story by: Robert Sheckley

Original title: La decima vittima

Cast: Ursula Andress, Marcello Mastroianni, Elsa Martinelli, Salvo Randone

Italy 1965

90 mins

A man chases a woman through some of New York’s least populated streets, occasionally firing a gun at her as she playfully hides and beckons him on. He is stopped by a policeman, but, as he has the correct license, is allowed to proceed, following her into a club, where she seems to have disappeared among the chic clientele. The entertainment arrives, a statuesque blonde in silver metal mask and matching bikini, who gyrates her way through the crowd, pausing to bump and grind and slap various men around the face. She approaches the gunman and proceeds to do the same, thoroughly distracting him from his quest, then suddenly shooting him dead with the twin guns built into her bikini top. She has won The Contest. She is Ursula Andress. Welcome to Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim, produced by Carlo Ponti, based on a short story by the great Robert Sheckley. It’s a variation on the ‘bread and circuses’ strain of SF, in which the future masses are distracted from war or revolution by violent spectacle (think Rollerball, Death Race 2000, The Hunger Games), but it’s a more 60s, hyper-stylised live action cartoon variation, a swingin’ romantic comedy with lives on the line, featuring a bleach-blond Marcello Mastroianni rocking a pair of shades versus Andress in a hot pink batwing number.

From its New York opening, the film moves to Rome where Andress, with media team in tow, has, according to the rules, become the hunter, with Mastroianni computer-selected as her victim. While our Ursula seems to be making the contest pay for her, Marcello is skint after a punitive divorce. She wants to engineer a photogenic demise for him at the Temple of Venus. He wants to survive, preferably unmarried. The rest of the film plays out as a game of cat and mouse in a series of staccato scenes, as the couple dance around, and inevitably fall for each other.

The Shameless disc comes with the usual plethora of groovy trailers, plus a half-hour featurette with Kim Newman and Petri’s wife talking about the film.

At times it resembles a demented Bond movie where the set designers have taken control of the script, at others it is like some futuristic offshoot of La Dolce Vita (it shares the same screenwriters.) Petri frames Rome to look sleek and strange and modernist, with most of the cast draped in black and white against blocks of primary colour. He fills the backgrounds of his scenes with loosely choreographed action: gladiators, musicians, dancers, killers. It’s a knowing piece of pop art cinema. Comic books are referenced frequently, (particularly Lee Falk’s The Phantom), the backdrops are filled with Op art and sculpture, artifice and unreality are consistently foregrounded, the crass commercialism of this modern world is mocked remorselessly, but this modern world still looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

While the backgrounds still fizz and excite, it has to be said that some of the foreground action hasn’t dated either. Some of the media satire is a bit blunt and obvious, the marriage/divorce obsession just seems odd, and often the whole thing just doesn’t feel as sharp or funny as it needs to be. Having said that, it sure as hell isn’t boring, managing to bubble through its moments of dysfunction and disjointedness with pure energy. There’s a pleasant freeform ramshackle vibe, it feels simultaneously over-stylised and under-rehearsed, and the leads seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. Mastroianni is a cartoon of taciturn indifference, but given to wild mood swings of snarling rage and sentimentality. Andress mostly plays a sense of frustrated determination, a would-be seductress/killer foiled by Marcello’s manoeuvres, looking pretty damn fabulous at all times. A shot where she walks out of the sea in imitation of her Honey Rider moment is, of course, engineered into the proceedings. Petri seems to be largely an unknown quantity, even to Euro-sleaze aficionados. I caught his A Quiet Place in the Country a few years back, and remember its star Franco Nero opining at that event that Elio was like Italy’s Kubrick, a master who made comparatively few films, all markedly different, and all great. On the strength of that, and this, I look forward to checking out the rest of the man’s work.

Mark Stafford

Read our review of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion.
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Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

Format: DVD + Blu-ray (R1/A)

Release date: 3 December 2013

Distributor: Criterion

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro

Cast: Gian Maria Volonté, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio

Original title: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto

Italy 1970

115 mins

An ambitious amalgam of fascist noir and absurdist satire, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion has unjustly been relegated to Oscar winner turned semi-obscurity status. The 1970 recipient of the Best Foreign Language film award, it follows the ethical and intellectual disintegration of a recently promoted police investigator.

Played by Sergio Leone favourite Gian Maria Volonté, the nameless Inspector slits his mistress’s throat in an act that, at least initially, appears to be a logical progression of the pair’s increasingly deviant psychosexual gamesmanship, reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. The Inspector then audaciously parades concrete evidence of his own guilt before the Gestapo-like task force he commandeers. Suspense is measured not by how long he can avoid being caught, but by how far his colleagues will stretch their belief in the innocence of their superior.

At least in a surficial sense, Investigation’s conflation of the personal and the political most immediately resembles Bertolucci’s The Conformist, another 1970 film that utilizes a flashback structure to probe the childlike neurosis that cripples the man at the centre of its narrative. Yet Volonté’s inspector, a creature of carnal energy and rabid intelligence who continually succumbs to infantile rages and bestial perversities, is practically the inverse of the soul-shaken title character of The Conformist.

Director Elio Petri, a one-time communist journalist, immerses his central character in a skewed bureaucratic world defined by the sickly, death-pallor humour that percolated just under the skin of Bertolucci’s film. The Inspector offers maxims such as ‘Revolution is like syphilis, it’s in the blood’ to his followers, and maintains an easy rapport with a paparazzo covering the murder case. High-level officials gather to catalogue and scrutinize instances of leftist vandalism in their jurisdiction, and the meeting is ludicrously filled with earnest analysis and pregnant pauses; aside from the typical graffiti favouring Trotsky and Mao, there’s been a curious upswing in pro-Marquis de Sade tagging amongst brutalized revolutionaries.

Yet Petri gamely imbues the proceedings with a genuine sense of Big Brother menace that predicts the post-Watergate nightmares of The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula’s 1970s oeuvre. Creeping zooms from obscure, elevated vantage points suggest a clandestine, all-knowing hierarchy stretching upwards into infinity, while a tour of the police headquarters exposes miles-long caverns occupied by an army of wiretapping professionals and wall-to-wall surveillance equipment. And in the only instance we see the Inspector allowing for self-examination, he torturously sweats over his home tape recorder, feeding it riddles on the nature of power and the law. Of equal import to this balance of vicious satire and omnipresent paranoia is the film’s jaunty yet queasy Ennio Morricone score, referred to by the composer as a kind of grotesque folk music. That Morricone wrote the theme without having actually seen the film somehow only heightens the levels of moral and ideological incongruity on display.

Struggling with the very complexities of the film’s tone, Petri overstrains for narrative tidiness in the final act, employing an unwelcome excess of expository dialogue. Yet the painfully forthright points made about the jealousy, emotional regression and fascist madness consuming the Inspector’s psyche are offset by a spellbinding fever dream finale wholly worthy of the Kafka quote which graces the film’s last frame. And as a riotous gathering of fiery leftist students becomes nothing more than another layer of background ambiance against which the Inspector’s sanity unravels, Investigation ultimately reveals itself as an amber-preserved instant of 60s counter-culture fury transformed into new-decade fatalism.

Michael Wojtas