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The Risorgimento, along the lines of Mallarmé's "Le Phénomène futur" as "une époque qui survit à la beauté." (The chaplain is more concise: "Brutti tempi.") It begins with reference to De Sica's Un Garibaldino al convento, the family prayer is interrupted by the sounds of gunfire and the discovery of a dead soldier in the garden. The aristocracy must take the long view during times of upheaval, not for nothing does the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) keep a telescope in his study, his fiery nephew (Alain Delon) charges into action and then dons a stylish eyepatch. (Elevated long shots give fusillades in Palermo streets a contemplative historical perspective.) "Simply an imperceptible replacement of one class for another," adaptation and the leopard with intransigent spots: "For things to remain the same, everything must change." Twentieth-Century Fox widescreen and Technicolor are turned into ecstatic and mournful canvases for Luchino Visconti's supreme elegy. The Prince looks at il Tricolore and sees only discordant hues, the same colors of the toast offered by the bourgeois politician (Paolo Stoppa) whose daughter (Claudia Cardinale) is "lovely as the sun" but packs a raucous guffaw. The realm of nobility, "un universo particulare" with gods painted on the ceiling—the camera pans across the bluebloods covered in gray ash in church, living statuary. Picnic before orange hills, hide and seek in the deserted palace. Visconti's parade of magnificence is a drift toward oblivion, the protagonist is all too aware of "the longing for voluptuous immobility" as he moves through the grand ball that is the overwhelming epilogue. Acres of gold leaf and candelabra, the whole rigmarole of fanning, waltzing, hand-kissing and heel-clicking, the reactionary's aching fugue dissolving in a Greuze painting and a misty morning. A favorite study for Kubrick (Barry Lyndon) and Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Scorsese (The Age of Innocence). Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. With Rina Morelli, Romolo Valli, Serge Reggiani, Leslie French, Pierre Clémenti, Terence Hill, and Lucilla Morlacchi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |