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A flipbook of postcards, but, as Chris Marker would have it, "postcards chosen according to a passing mood." Traffic lights at canal intersections, edifices with ancient frescoes and TV antennas, the "fancy secretary" from Ohio (Katharine Hepburn) takes in Venice. "It's Italy, isn't it?" "Is it?" A profusion of lovers cuts into the middle-aged bachelorette, who catches the eye of the antique dealer (Rossano Brazzi) with the eroticism of a well-turned ankle. A glass goblet is held up to the camera as embodiment of the uneasy romance—legitimate artifact or ersatz souvenir? "You Americans get so disturbed about sex." "We don't take it lightly." "Take it, don't talk it." David Lean at a crossroads with a Brief Encounter variant, suspended between the earlier film's interiority and the gigantism of subsequent epics. The city shimmers before the tourist's lenses, sunlight turns piazzas golden, mechanical statuary tip their hats from the towers. Contrasting Yank couples lounge on the margins, young painter and wife (Darren McGavin, Mari Aldon) and Illinois sightseers (Jane Rose, MacDonald Parke) mangling "arrivederci" for the benefit of Donen's Two for the Road. (Isa Miranda's pensione owner glares at the rotund philistine, "he probably likes French food.") Lean quotes Lubitsch with a gondolier's singing interrupted by a pail of slop, and anticipates Resnais with an up-angle tracking shot through a narrow passageway amid neighborhood sounds. Neorealismo is taken into account with street urchin and mousy maid, the Antonioni approach is divined, "all time I see signorina walking and walking." Amorous ravioli and drifting gardenias, Hepburn's tremulousness as a continuous tussle of caution and desire, the aborted rendezvous dissolving from fairy-tale restaurant to espresso counter surrounded by blue neon. "Something happens to this city at night," nothing an orgasm of fireworks can't illuminate. Sirk has Brazzi for the riposte, Interlude. Cinematography by Jack Hildyard.
--- Fernando F. Croce |