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Released by: Twilight Time Releasing
Released on: May, 2016.
Director: Gianluigi Calderone
Cast: Gabriele Ferzetti, Ornella Muti, Eleonora Giorgi, Ninetto Davoli, Valentina Cortese
Year:1974
Purchase From Screen Archives
The Movie:
It doesn't get much weirder than 1974's APPASSIONATA. Dubbed by some as a spiritual precursor to AMERICAN BEAUTY, this Italian production is a strange mix of arthouse pretension, softcore exploitation and social commentary.
APPASSIONATA is the story of a middle aged dentist named Emilio (Gabriele Ferzetti) facing crippling ennui while dealing with mentally ill wife Elisa (Valentina Cortese), demanding "daddy's little girl" daughter Eugenia (Ornella Muti) and a sexually aggressive schoolgirl named Nicola (Eleonora Giorgi). The title, with its clear reference to classical music, ties in to the wife's passion for playing the piano.
It quickly becomes clear that this is no lighthearted Tinto Brass romp. There are moments when the film plays like a sex fantasy for older men attracted to nubile young women, but the fact that these sequences are interspersed with jarring scenes with an incest subtext make this film an often profoundly unsettling experience. One of the most disturbing scenes is the one where the schoolgirl friend of his daughter comes to Emilio's dentistry practice for a checkup. Claiming an intense aversion to pain, she demands laughing gas. This leads to the girl getting delirious and practically raping the dentist. It's a strange bit of business that plays quite uncomfortably in 2016. To be fair, Italian films of this period were hardly strangers to hyper-sexed characters of either gender, but the whole notion that the not particularly interesting Emilio would be the target of this kind of unrestrained lust is a bit hard to take.
The rest of the film centers on Emilio's affair with the schoolgirl and his grotesquely inappropriate relationship with his own daughter and twisted interactions with his wife. Eugenia talks constantly of wanting to run away with her father, sits on his lap and touches him inappropriately. The wife constantly frets over her husband and while she is a sympathetic character, the daughter and her friend are not. The schoolgirl is capricious and haughty and the daughter is a psychologically twisted brat.
The strangest thing about APPASSIONATA is that in the end it is an oddly compelling film for fans of off kilter European - and especially Italian - films of the 1970's. The pacing is deliberately slow but the dreamlike ambiance lulls the viewer. The utterly bizarre and disturbing dream sequence involving a dog is so out of left field that it constitutes one of the great "what the Hell?" moments in European cinema. APPASSIONATA messes with you mentally. Men expecting some good old fashioned titillation will be creeped out at the most surprising times, and the more high minded looking for deep social commentary will be slightly appalled when the film hoes for the low road. Let's put it this way: you won't like most of these folks, but you WILL find them interesting.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Soft. That's the operative word here. Roll it around your mind and let it settle, because that's the overwhelming thing that we are dealing with here. Twilight Time's MPEG-4 AVC encoded 1.85:1 aspect ratio 1080p presentation does look faithful to the source material however. Some odd things to note are the slight windowboxing of the image and the tendency towards mild color bleeding when characters are decked out in unusually "loud" garments. Parts of the film have an almost gauzy haze - but that is obviously intentional. No digital manipulation of the image is apparent. This is clearly an HD image - just that of a film shot very soft.
The Italian and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks both suffer from a slightly artificial feel and occasional sync issues. This is most certainly due to the nature of period film recording in Italy at that time - it was all done in post production. There was no live sound recorded on set. That stated, everything is completely audible with no dropouts that I could hear. I prefer the Italian track for its more authentic feel, but the English dub is far from the kind of disaster that these sorts of things can be. Range overall is solid but limited by the source materials.
There are no extras - just an isolated score (which coincidentally is the best sounding of all the audio tracks with a nice full bodied feel) and some interesting Julie Kirgo liner notes.
The Final Word:
Recommended for aficionados of strange Italian cinema of the 1970s. I would suggest that this film holds most interest to those with an arthouse bent. The exploitation elements are most certainly there, but they are used in such a disturbing way that I could never recommend this film as any kind of a romp. Let's be crystal clear though. This movie is politically incorrect down to the bone.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
