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"Don't leave your heart" is the advice not heeded, as if Vittorio Cottafavi's characters had a choice. The past returns to the protagonist (Armando Francioli) with such force that he ditches his family after his baby's baptism and races to the Milanese sanatorium where his former flame (Barbara Laage) expires, the memory behind the wheel makes up most of the tale. The two first lock eyes at a swanky restaurant, he's an engineer and thus "a nobody" in such moneyed circles, she's a banker's mistress. She remembers him as "a little sad but nice" when they again cross paths, his ardor melts her pricey tag in a passionate kiss. So it goes, the Dumas courtesan with a cocaine habit, not Verdi's opera but Cottafavi's own emotive musicality. "Meno arte, più vita!" The couple's joy is a fragile item amidst the materialistic boom, they read about Montezuma's gold metropolis before getting interrupted by the threat of ruin from the moneybags who wants her back. The camerawork is of uncanny lucidity and mobility, a dolly-out from Francioli in doleful close-up to a dinner prepared but untouched, a slap captured via swift curving tracks as if the lens were magnetized by the faces onscreen. The centerpiece traces the heroine's wordless wanderings in the night—lost in thought aboard the train, mocked by billboards in a deserted alley, alone with her bloodied essence in a high-angled view of her bedroom. (The kinship is maybe closer to Duvivier's Anna Karenina than to Cukor's Camille.) Too late in the end, all that's left are ice-capped mountains in the distance and a glance exchanged between rivals. "Neither one of us will ever forgive the other." A certain "architetto esistenziale" is mentioned early on, the debt to Cronaca di un amore is repaid in Le Amiche. With Eduardo De Filippo, Marcello Giorda, Adolfo Geri, and Gabrielle Dorziat. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |