Tinto Brass
Così Fan Tutte

THE REVIEW

This ugly and unwatchable film - I say it right away, to avoid the usual instrumental controversies by the usual wise guys - is the expression of a double mystery, a mystery that touches the lives of its director and its protagonist. It reflects the mystery of life, wasted opportunities, the possibilities of a comeback, missed aspirations, and destinies that intersect and diverge.

Tinto Brass and Claudia Koll: one a sanguine Venetian, an angry director in the '60s, an unconventional intellectual with a taste for provocation, and the ultimate provocation of wasting an (French-inspired) auteur vocation in the creation of films first destined to scandalize (Salon Kitty, Caligula), then to tease the beauty of alluring Italian actresses (The Key, Miranda, Capriccio, Paprika), later touching the shores of the most hackneyed soft core with winks at Eastern beauties (P.O. Box Tinto Brass, The Voyeur) or the biting and trashy meta-cinema with the recovery of prose actresses in a sadomasochistic version (Black Angel); the other a Roman bourgeoisie, an actress of great hopes, tempted by the simplest path to success, showcasing a moon-like skin and a statuesque physique, an uncommon beauty, almost exotic, later devoted to television entertainment with family-oriented crime fiction (Linda and the Brigadier, Valeria medico legale), and then ascended, not without personal struggle, to a greater awareness, inspired by a religious feeling that led her first to spread the Word, choosing to appear only in films directly or indirectly dealing with Faith.

It feels as if we are faced with a Janus-faced mirror of our Italy: vice opposed to virtue; wasted talent opposed to talent aware of its shortcomings; the material world opposed to the spiritual world, almost echoing the ancient dualism between Aristotelianism and Platonism; senses opposed to Spirit; the manifold, hyper-activism, promiscuity, decadence opposed to the One, contemplation, chastity, the preservation of that which is not transitory; old age and death, in a sort of cupio dissolvi, opposed to the eternal youth of the spiritual world, the promise of immortality.

To what conclusions does this slender, sloppy, cobbled-together film lead us, rethought today, in which a liberated bride temporarily leaves her husband to live various sexual adventures, between sodomies, incestuous ties, borderline relations with priests met at a rave party, with elderly employers, to eventually reunite with her husband, called to accept his wife's oddities, the fact of not being the only one, although the one and only.

It's curious how this superficial work, reconsidered with hindsight, implicitly alludes to the aforementioned dualisms, filtered through the perspective of couple's relations: the male and marital vision - Apollonian I would say - devoted to unity, the singularity of relationships, the repression of one's ardors and instincts in defense of a certain abstract and imposed rationality, but ultimately devoted to the preservation of self; the female and womanly vision - probably Dionysian - devoted to the multiple, the experience of self through a descent into the world, the dispersion of one's person and spirit, and the transmutation of one's nature.

Born badly, aged worse, this film today makes us reflect, not for what it was (little) but for what it has demonstrated over time: this is how a mere exercise in style, vacuous or devoid of content, can become, through the filter of the interpreter, in the context of a hermeneutic circle à la Gadamer, an opportunity for a deeper look at the world and ourselves. Almost like a masterpiece. But "almost," keep calm wise guys.