Passion of Love

In the Italy of the 1860s, the young officer Giorgio is posted to a country garrison far from his lover. He is lodged in the colonel's house, and there he meets Fosca: ill, taken to be ugly, a woman nobody goes near. From the first day Fosca attaches herself to him with an obsessive love. Giorgio tries to get away at first, then is drawn inside the bond. Ettore Scola directed the film from Iginio Ugo Tarchetti's 1869 novel Fosca, and it screened at Cannes in 1981. Valeria D'Obici plays Fosca and Bernard Giraudeau plays Giorgio. The telling does not build Fosca as someone to be pitied; it turns wanting itself into a force. Stephen Sondheim wrote his musical Passion after seeing this film.