Billy Wilder
Viale Del Tramonto

A film can be old, outdated, modern, or recent; however, a recent film is not necessarily modern... just as an outdated work doesn't have to be old. Time erodes a film, and the spirit contained within it can do the same, crumbling just as the inevitable change in trends and ideas... or never aging.

Thus, a film that achieves great success in a certain era, because it reflects that era, contributing itself to the "fashion" of that era, becomes expired and irrelevant 60 years later, hence old.

Sunset Boulevard, shot in 1950, is an outdated film but incredibly modern.

A screenwriter (William Holden) finds himself in serious financial trouble, never finding a job. One night, pursued by agents who want to confiscate his car, he takes refuge in an enormous and ghostly mansion: it's the home of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a great silent film diva, now eclipsed due to the arrival of color and sound. She will pay him to write a screenplay that can bring her back to the screen...

The former diva lives in complete isolation, believing she lives as if in a movie, still idolized by her public (disappeared like her); her butler (Erich Von Stroheim) even sends her letters to make her believe she still has many fans. Every night she screens her films at home, refusing to go out ("I am still big, it’s the pictures that got small!"). She invites other failed actors like herself to play cards, true mummies. In short, a house of ghosts (cathedral organ in the living room, bed shaped like a gondola..).

The writer (who tells the story in the third person, dead in the pool!) seduces her and exploits her madness, pretending to write her a story while minding his own business, maintained in the most excessive luxury... but in the end, she takes her revenge.

The final scene is incredible, with Swanson descending her stairs as if in front of a thousand spotlights... of the police.

It starts as a "noir" comedy, becomes a thriller, then dramatic. Never a yawn, the film captures us, plunging us into the protagonist's delirium, almost making us revel in her destruction, in an unprecedented attack on stardom and show-business, the plastic dream sold by Hollywood studios.

Ironically, the actors are simply themselves: like Stroheim, a great director from the past, in the film reduced to indulging the diva's whims; and then her, Gloria Swanson, a true silent film actress, playing herself in a constant alternation of unnatural fits and grimaces, showcasing herself every minute of the day as if in front of the spotlights, with eyes that I find terrifying ("We didn't need dialogue, we had faces!").

The film is as full of comedy (the writer's thoughts) as it is of grotesqueness (the monkey buried in the garden..), but above all, it triumphs in the absurdity and mystery of the human mind; in this sense, it is a psychological film, and one of the first of its kind in Hollywood.

It is perhaps the greatest film of a legendary director.