Into the Forest with Shimizu and Visconti

A rediscovery of the Japanese auteur and the last film from the Italian.

Poetic economy was never among Luchino Visconti’s priorities, and I’ve endured the lion’s share of the man’s filmography, beloved as it was in the imported art film heyday by middle-class high-lit-&-opulence-porn addicts, as one abides a disinterested waiter in an expensive restaurant. All of his most famous films lumber in straight lines like elephants on a leash. Commonly, there’s no knowledge in his shots, just clutter and wealth. I was then surprised, then, in revisiting “L’Innocente” (1976), Visconti’s last movie and something of a worldwide hit, due most probably to the degree that the director’s high-hat Euro-pretensions made Laura Antonelli’s nudity seem almost artful. But the movie cooks narratively, thanks to Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s layered novel and veteran screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico’s good sense to follow it: Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini), a late-1800s aristocrat, is married to the pliant Giuliana (Antonelli), but nakedly pursues a parallel life as a skirt-chasing libertine, virtually bragging to her about his new love for a widowed countess (Jennifer O’Neill).

As the characters are subsumed in Visconti’s characteristic forest of interior bric-a-brac — Antonelli’s voluptuousness is only rivaled visually by the relentless fleur-de-lis wallpaper — Giuliana engages in her own infidelity (off-screen), and Tullio’s sense of control begins to collapse. In an almost Hemingway-esque fashion, the couple tiptoe around the real subject at hand, and because the drama is subterranean, we watch leaning forward, and wait for the eruption. When it comes, slow like a pig-sticking, “L’Innocente” becomes one of the most razor-sharp films ever made about masculine privilege. Visconti’s touch is startlingly nuanced (the scene played out while Antonelli wears a gray funeral veil stretched across her face is unnerving), and Antonelli, as unpracticed and anxious and unsure of herself as Joan Fontaine in “Rebecca,” makes the whole drama stick to the wall like glue.

“Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu” (Criterion Collection) and “L’Innocente” (Koch Lorber) are now available on DVD.

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