Violent Summer

Summer 1943, Riccione. Carlo, the son of a Fascist official, has been kept out of military service and spends his days dancing on the beach with his friends. He meets Roberta, the widow of a naval officer. As the affair begins, Mussolini falls, and the war, which had so far never found this beach, walks straight in. Valerio Zurlini directs. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Carlo and Eleonora Rossi Drago plays Roberta, a performance that won her the Nastro d'Argento for best actress. The two most remembered scenes both work through sound. First a record party cut open by air raid sirens; then, at the end, a station where a train is bombed. Zurlini builds the war not as a front but as a noise approaching from behind. Zurlini's cinema sits between Italian neorealism and the bourgeois dramas that came after, and this film is one of the clearest points of that transition. Who it is for: anyone drawn to late fifties Italian cinema and to love stories told at the edge of a war. Who it is not for: viewers who want history at the centre of the plot. Here politics stays outside, and the characters notice it far too late.