tlavideo.com

Amos Lassen wrote on 03/12/2012:

An old American college professor (Burt Lancaster) lives a solitary life in Rome and he does so in luxury. An Italian marchesa comes to see him and wants to rent an apartment from him and forces him to rent to her and her lover, her daughter and her friends. His life suddenly takes a new course and the chaos of his new tenant(s) almost drives him mad. This is the first film that Luchino Visconti made after his near fatal heart attack and is significant as a comeback for the director. He deals with the themes of death, solitude and loneliness, the disintegration of the family and decay of tradition. Visconti concentrates on the search for harmony in life in a hostile environment. This is a lot to deal with and I found that in order to really understand the film I had to watch it four times. By the end of the last viewing, I felt that I had really seen an important film.
Visconti looks at a society in the process of decay. The professor had surrounded himself with beauty yet he comes across as a disillusioned man. He prefers beauty to people and we see this here right away. He lives alone in apartment which is where the entire movie takes place and therefore what we see is through the professor’s eyes. He has planned out the rest of his life and all is fine until a young man with no scruples, Konrad (Helmut Berger), enters his life and turns it upside down and inside out. Konrad is a gigolo for a marchesa and he is filled with deceit. We learn that the professor dreams of family and he reminisces about his youth, his mother and his young bride who left him years before. His memories are often interrupted by the noise of his tenants and he thinks that they could have been his family under other circumstances. He does not know these people and he certainly does not understand them but he feels affection for them. These illusions eventually cost him his life and his downward spiral began with Konrad’s suicide.
A group of people make their way into the professor’s life—aside from Konrad there is Marchesa Bianca Brumonti (Silvana Mangano), her daughter Lietta (Claudia Marsani) and her boyfriend Stefano (Stefano Patrizi). The speak coarsely and they are openly bisexual. This bothers the professor and things get worse by the minute, it seems. When they finally engage in conversation, things heat up and we begin to move toward a climax. There seems to be a constant effort at communication but even through talk, it does not happen. Visconti is saying something about family but because the dialogue does seem to be honest, we do not catch it. Visconti like the professor is nearing death and as people do, he reminisces as we watch.
This is certainly not Visconti at his best but this is not his worst either. I love it when a film challenges me and this film does just that. Watching it may not be a pleasurable experience bit it most certainly is an experience… and Helmut Berger with his sultry, sexy looks is worth whatever it costs to see this movie.