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OSSESSIONE
Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1943
Friday 20 August 2004 11.30pm-1.45am
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Ossessione marks Luchino Visconti's stunning debut, adapted from American novelist James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. It begins with the arrival of Gino, a travelling tramp (Massimo Girotti), who stops off at Bragana's (Juan De Landa) roadside trattoria for a drink. He's immediately attracted to the oafish landlord's wife Giovanna (Clara Calamai), who returns his lustful gaze, and Gino hatches a plan to inveigle his way into the life and bed of his unwitting host Bragana.
The film is a hotbed of smouldering passion, playfully symbolised by boiling pans, screaming cats and gathering storms. But as the story unfolds, the twisting psychological journey suffered by the deviant lovers, coupled with the film's moral ambiguity, stretches the tension to near breaking point.
Knowing glances and sexual gratification are corroded to mercenary pleasure and paranoia - the self-sufficient Italian family idyll is as broken as the shattered glass that Gino sweeps aside during Bragana's fitting rendition of Verdi's familial tragedy, La Traviata.
Visconti's sweeping overhead camera, coming to rest on expressive close-ups, are a pure joy and capture beautifully the face of tormented consciences, agonised by betrayal, caught up in the daily bustle of Ancona's street life.
Unlike Visconti's later work (most notably The Leopard, 1963), Ossessione is not tied up in political or social history yet it became an obsession with the church and Mussolini's Cultural Ministry who deemed it "a film that stinks of latrines". With its setting in the heart of quintessential Italian life (equally matching De Sirca's naturalistic portrayal in The Bicycle Thieves) the dictatorship perceived it 'un-Italian' and forced censors to cut numerous scenes.
Despite these invasions, Ossessione's tragic energy remains devastatingly intact. Out of the brutal force of raw, human passion, Visconti has created a classic of Italian cinema.
Clare Norton-Smith
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Ossessione was so scandalous on its release that an archbishop was asked to sprinkle holy water in the auditorium following the screening.
