Valerio Zurlini
La Prima Notte di Quiete

The human rubble of a restless soul is the warm matter of a wintery Rimini, anti-Fellinian in every way. To the notes of Domani è un altro Giorno by Ornella Vanoni, Valerio Zurlini creates one of the most beautiful scenes in Italian cinema: the main characters of the story communicate through a gaze exchange, brimming with the existential discomfort of a society now definitively changed, illuminated and split by the strobe lights of Mario di Palma, director of photography. The dance is the recurring topos of Zurlini's poetics: in "Estate Violenta", Jean-Louis Trintignant and Eleonora Rossi Drago, on a hot summer night, barely manage to hide the burning desire to possess each other, Zurlini's eye reveals their passion to the viewer to the notes of Temptation, without any dialogue.

The aristocratic cinema of Zurlini would have been impossible without the superb expressive charge of the actors who accompanied him in his concise directorial career. In "La Prima Notte di Quiete" an extraordinary cast participates in the melodrama with dark and passionate hues reminiscent of a 19th-century European novel. The Professor Daniele Dominici, played by Alain Delon in one of his best performances, is Zurlini's alter ego, a character openly autobiographical, who not coincidentally wears the camel coat and green sweater of the director. Dominici, a Professor of Literature, decides to return to Rimini to teach at a high school, where he will meet Vanina, his student, from whom the entire amorous and troubled story of the film will unfold. In the city, driven by his passion for gambling, he meets the "vitelloni", played by Giancarlo Giannini, Renato Salvatori, and Adalberto Maria Merli, men bored and corrupted by the urban and social conditions of the era in which they are trapped. Lea Massari and Alida Valli complete the large cast of big names. Zurlini, in the first part of the film, composes a true sonnet in images dedicated to Sonia Petrovna (Vanina), a seductive meteor of incredible beauty, one of the most striking in Italian cinema, grappling with a multifaceted character with a murky past.

Zurlini, like Pietrangeli, has always had a certain regard for the psychological characterization of female characters, real and alive, who tear apart the pedantic morality of a male-dominated society and find in their own contradictions and (melo)dramas the affirmation of a femininity constantly balancing between purity and baseness. The impossible loves staged by Zurlini always present characters who experience a deep crisis, usually related to transitioning to a subsequent phase of their lives. Loves that act as emotional catharsis and shake the psyche of those who live them, with irrationality prevailing over the prevailing morality and living of itself until the abrupt awakening from the illusion. In "La Prima Notte di Quiete" Vanina's catharsis has an emotional and intellectual nature, she falls in love with Professor Dominici while he analyzes for her "La Madonna del Parto" by Piero della Francesca in Monterchi, the infatuation happens in front of a painting, a catalyst for the awakening of irrationality in front of a squalid and unhappy reality. Paintings of religious and mythological subjects line the elegant interiors of houses frequented by Zurlini's characters, not only as a representation of sterile aristocratic patronage but as a dense weave of the author's spiritual interiority, always tending to expose his audacious sentimentality without embarrassment. The turbulent sea of Rimini breaks up the narrative in several parts, giving the drama breathing space and, a bit like Tarkovsky's metaphysical sea of Solaris, is an expression of the emotional tumult shaking the lives of the film's characters. The shots of Rimini's harbor accompanied by the piercing trumpet of Maynard Ferguson slow the narrative and give the film a atypical temporality, they are a clear example of the authorship of a director who has never accepted compromises just to see his poetics come to life on the screen. Space and architecture intertwine in the narrative and may remind one of Antonioni's cinema, but Zurlini's stylistic hallmark is more intimate and less evident. At the end of filming, Zurlini and Delon, both dissatisfied with each other's work, parted coldly. Wrongly, as this film represents an artistic pinnacle for both of them.

Between 1960 and the mid-'70s, Italy was a hotbed of talent; the usual names are rightly celebrated through showcases and retrospectives that keep alive the memory of our fundamental contribution to the history of the seventh art; others, less fortunate, have been almost completely forgotten. Valerio Zurlini dedicated his life to cinema and, though receiving more disappointments than accolades, produced a cinematic corpus of disarming qualitative compactness and intellectual honesty, which deserves to be rediscovered and analyzed. It is 1972, it will take another four years for his last film before his death in 1982, the film adaptation of "Il Deserto dei Tartari" by Dino Buzzati.

Spider: ""Why is death the first night of quiet?""
Dominici: ""Because finally one sleeps without dreams""