THE HUNGARIANS IMAGYAROKI By VINCENT CANBY a CCSXSXSSW Ml CALL FOR TIMES 238-8899 PREMIERE STARTS Oct 13 Nov 3-16 Oct 27-Nov 2 Nov 17-23 STILL ONLY $1.50 screams from upstairs, meddlesome old doctor, Jean-Louis Trintignant in The unit’s played by one of his transferred to an isolated outpost in the north, he writes Clara in the accepted style. “All I live for is you,” he pledges. “You are my religion.” first real character roles, assures Giorgio that the lady lies forever at death’s door but that she is so weak “her body doesn’t have the energy to contract a fatal illness.” m s NOT RELIEVE IN TEARS Sept 29-0ct 5 A Wise and Stunning film! — Jack Kroll, Newsweek NW DINNER ANPRE ‘4 ‘4 ALAIN TANNER'S || JONAII who will be 25 ebc IJork eimcs MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1981 HE time is 1862 and the place is Italy during one of the infrequent periods of peace between wars of unification. The Romantic Movement, so closely identified with the Risorgimento, defines everything in terms of the ideal — ideal courage, ideal loyalty, ideal love, ideal beauty. In this briefly halcyon time, Captain Giorgio Bacchetti (Bernard Girau- deau), an ideally handsome young cavalry officer, falls heedlessly, ecstatically in love with Clara (Laura Antonelli), the beautiful wife of a rich, much older man. Their adultery, Giorgio tells Clara, is sanctified by heaven. He goes further. “Adultery,” he says, “restores rights otherwise denied to women.” Theirs is. briefly, the perfect love affair. It demands no great sacrifices on either side and gives them the opportunity to express their physical passion to the utmost, without fear of pain or remorse. When Giorgio is suddenly The film is not really about the affair of the handsome cavalry officer and his pretty, uninhibited mistress, but about the tumultuous situation in which Giorgio finds himself after he’s been sent to the small outpost in the mountains of northern Italy. There he becomes the obsession of his colonel’s extraordinary cousin Fosca (Valeria D’Obici), a possibly mad, brilliantly willful young woman of 29 though she looks to be anywhere between 40 and 50. With her hooked nose, her toothy mouth, her lips that Giorgio describes as "sepulchral,” and a figure so gaunt she seems already dead, Fosca is, by her very appearance, an affront to idealized womanhood. For the first few weeks Giorgio is at his new post, he doesn’t see Fosca, though he sometimes hears her lunatic When Fosca finally does make her appearance at the officers’ mess, it is clear what her problem is. She is truly hideous-looking but she refuses to accept her fate. Further, in the weeks before making herself known to Giorgio, she has been spying on him and has fallen desperately in love with him. Without shame or pride, she humiliates herself in pursuing the young man, who is initially appalled, then annoyed, then frightened and, finally, snared in a fashion that becomes the point of this dark, intelligent, mirthless comedy. That Fosca should, in ways that cannot be revealed here, triumph after a fashion is the essential joke of the story. It must also be admitted that it seems like the ultraromantic conceit of a tale so virulently antiromantic. “Passione d’Amore” is the most ambitious Scola film yet seen in this country, not simply because of the meticulously reproduced (and moodily photographed) period detail, but because of its point of view, which rigorously denies the audience any figure with which you can easily identify. It’s a movie whose meanings creep up on you. It keeps you always on that thin edge between laughter and despair, and never allows you the relief of either reaction. As in all Scola films, the performances are full of unexpected revelations. Mr. Giraudeau, whom I can't remember seeing before, is a most satisfying, self-satisfied lover-victim, and Miss Antonelli, looking suddenly like the Vivien Leigh of “Anna Karenina,” is charming in a comparatively small but important role. Don t Miss Passione d'Amore'!.. A Compelling and Beautifully Wrought Tale.' — Stephen Schaefer, Us Magazine "You'll Really Love This Tilm. It Will Touch You Rather Deeply!" — Judith Crist PLUS fa THE WEAVERS IN A THRILLER I |Gn<orys Girl BREAKING AWAY Clinton St. Quarterly 47
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