Senso (Criterion)
Operatic, painterly, theatrical, musical. Senso (1954), the fourth feature from Luchino Visconti, is all of these, but ultimately this lush, lavish melodrama of a self-destructive love affair set against the idealistic passions of the Risorgimento (the fight for the unification of Italy) is the very definition of cinematic.
Senso opens in La Fenice, the magnificent Venice opera house, during a production of Verdi’s “Il Travatore,” and as the aria ends with a climactic call to arms, the upper balconies explode with their own call to arms with a hurricane of three-color leaflets (red, green and white, the colors of the Italian flag) and bouquets showered upon the soldiers on the floor. The sequence is a visual symphony conducted masterfully by Visconti: art and life mirrored in the dramas on- and off-stage, political action battling social decorum and conformism for dominance in a communal hub where everything is a matter of etiquette and codes of behavior, the occupying army an island of Teutonic white uniforms in the center of Italian color and culture.
Visconti maintains the tension between the personal—the cagey flirtation begun by proud Venetian Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) to save her revolutionary-leader cousin from a duel with Austrian officer Franz Mahler (Farley Granger), a ladies man of a lieutenant in a crisp white uniform—and the national march toward revolution and unification. (Valli and Granger were not Visconti’s first choices—the original script was written with Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman in mind, but Bergman turned it down and the producers reportedly turned down Brando for Granger.)