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Delirium... pure delirium is the mind of the painter Leonardo, of whom Petri tells us, with his profound mastery and elegant camera movements, in this very original film from '69 and I also believe truly rare in the landscape of Italian cinema, an almost psychedelic film about madness.
After the opening credits while artworks by romantic and maudit artists from Ingres, Delacroix to Magritte and Bacon, and arrows, letters, and numbers that refer to informal art are shown, we see a half-naked man tied to a chair: it is Leonardo, a highly valued informal art painter in the markets. He lives in this studio with Flavia: she is his art dealer, his woman, his lover, and also his mother. The relationship between the two is definitely based on sex, sometimes almost sadomasochistic, and on the economic relationship.
After the first remarks on how the entire society has become electrified, how it is racing towards progress, we start to understand the psychosis that totally invades the life of the painter: his mind wanders between delusions of killing between him and his woman where now he, now she are both victim and executioner, between hallucinations in which Flavia is the annihilating woman and voyeuristic impulses (the scene at the newsstand while ordering newspapers like le Nouvelle Observateur, l'Unita, le Monde... is stunning, his desire instead is to buy porno or sees female breasts and buttocks while scrolling through slides about famine in Africa). Leonardo, besides all this, is in a creative stasis, he doesn't know what to paint and Flavia tries to stimulate him because the market needs it. Leonardo says he needs to leave Milan and convinces the woman to rent a solitary villa in the Venetian countryside, where he can isolate himself to find peace and the energy to create again.
The villa, chosen by Leonardo always in the grip of visions, however, hides strange phenomena and a strange story of a countess killed in that place: this will become an obsession for the artist and will upset his already precarious balance until it makes him slip into complete delirium, only to end up in a Swiss sanatorium where he will barter his works in exchange for porn magazines.
First of all, the film certainly finds value in the well-chosen pair of protagonists Franco Nero, with his deep gaze. And Vanessa Redgrave, with her permanent slightly bitchy air that lends antipathy to her crude and calculating character. In the film, as in his works in general, Petri does not think he wants to pose strong theses but I believe he certainly makes a critique of a whole series of avant-garde artistic movements, intellectuals who perhaps, by neglecting political and social reality, end up alienating themselves (becoming psychotic) escaping reality (Leonardo indeed obsesses over the romantic story, set during the last war, of this nymphomaniac countess) and anchoring himself to the vitality of sex to try to regain his identity and also free himself from creative impotence, but this is an illusion indeed you cannot bring back to life what is dead and now under the control of market laws (Leonardo in the end looks out the window and sees everyone painting red revolutionary paintings, but in a park controlled by the police).
During this part in seeking at the villa, it seems that the film loses some of its flavor of alienation and neurosis and risks slipping into the classic mystery story but the director through superb use of footage gives movement and some scenes immediately bring us back to the painter's drama: as when he goes to Venice to find out more about the countess's mother and she welcomes him lying like Mme Recamier of David or Pauline of Canova and he sees her as a coffin in Magritte's depiction; certainly, the film is a tribute to art (there are continuous references to body art, action painting, land art, and indeed Petri brought in the painter Jim Dine to show Nero how to compose the works) and also an excellent description of the anxieties and phobias of a man on the brink of severe mental illness. The splendid cinematography of Kuveiller is further enhanced by the sound creations of Morricone through these cacophonous, shrill, and unsettling music.
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