The Innocent

Luchino Visconti's last film. Tullio is an aristocrat at the end of the nineteenth century. He is married, keeps a mistress openly and tells his wife about it; he counts his own freedom a natural right. His wife Giuliana bears it for a long time. Then she turns to someone else, and Tullio's whole order collapses. What the film is interested in is hypocrisy: Tullio cannot accept for his wife what he defends for himself, and that contradiction takes him step by step to a terrible decision. Visconti's known concerns are here too: the decline of the aristocracy, the weight of interiors, the exactness of period detail, and how a class justifies itself. The source is Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel. The director made it while ill and died before the editing was finished; the film opened after his death. Giancarlo Giannini plays Tullio and Laura Antonelli plays Giuliana. An important closing chapter for admirers of Visconti and Italian period cinema. For a viewer who wants a sympathetic lead, Tullio is repellent throughout and the film does not defend him; the narrative is also slow.