Luchino Visconti
Senso

Senso.

I like to give a dual interpretation of why this film, and the related story by Camillo Boito from which it is derived, are called this way.

On one hand, the sense intended as passion, amorous sense; on the other, the sense that a war can have.

In both cases, however, there is no sense.

In the first case, because Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) falls madly in love with the young Austrian lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger), to the most extreme consequences, to the point of denying everything she believed in.

In the second case, because for me, war really makes no sense.

And so I like to think that perhaps this film could have been called... Senso?

That said, we are talking about a 1954 film by the great Luchino Visconti which benefits from two young assistant directors: Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, quite a remarkable trio even though, as far as I'm concerned, I do not consider Zeffirelli a great director, Jesus of Nazareth excluded.

Set in Venice during the third Italian-Austrian war of independence, Senso narrates against the backdrop of the terrible war, the love story of a not-so-young countess with a handsome young heartbreaker lieutenant. I’d like to meet the lieutenant, I’ve heard a lot about him... Actually, the countess wants to meet him only to tell him to renounce the duel with her cousin, indeed. At the beginning of the film, in the magnificent prologue at the theatre La Fenice of Venice, during the performance of Il Trovatore, the Italians rise up, throwing tricolor leaflets from the boxes praising freedom and Italian independence. Chaos ensues, and in the midst of it, Roberto Ussoni (a convincing Massimo Girotti), the cousin, indeed throws down the gauntlet to the lieutenant who had dared to mock the Italians by more or less calling them barking dogs that do not bite.

...If you want to know the lieutenant, you should ask the women of Venice...

Foolish, foolish! From the start you already knew what Mahler was like, you were warned... how could you lose your head for him like that?

And yet she loses it immediately and badly without him even touching her with a finger, on that cursed night, in that cursed stroll through the alleys of the Serenissima...

Lovers. Clandestine meetings, war is about to break out.

War. They lose sight of each other.

In the second part, the film takes off. It's no longer a love story. War breaks out. The war scenes are astonishing, Visconti was a perfectionist. The bersaglieri, the infantrymen, the Austrians, the horses, the cannons, the dead, the wounded, the chaos, the madness. What sense does war make?

The two lovers will find each other again and...

Senso?