598
PARTISAN REVIEW
and so are we, if tenuously , for the movie's brief duration .
Obssessione,
Luchino Visconti
This is the first public showing in this country of Visconti's first film
and so,
if
nothing else, an event of historic interest. Based on the James M.
Cain novel,
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Obssessione
is an odd,
painful film, by turns operatic and naturalistic, an early personal example
of what has been called neo-realism. More importantly, it
is
a work of unmis–
takable directorial signature. The film has three distinct movements like a
piece of music. In the first part, a young stranger and the smoldering, sexu–
ally deprived wife of an older man find themselves obsessively attracted to
one another. Unable to bear living apart, they contrive the murder of the
husband in what is made to seem an auto accident. In the second part of the
film, guilt (as obsessive in its own way as erotic fascination) drives them to
torment each other and ultimately to separate. In the third part, the lovers
are joyfully reconciled, the woman pregnant, only to find themselves pur–
sued by the police who have discovered their complicity in the husband's
murder. A second accident ensues-that fatal irony which is a convention
of the genre-and the characters come to grief. There is some release for the
viewer in the final accident in that it represents the fulfillment of an appar–
ent destiny. The most memorable scene in the film, closer in spirit to Renoir
than to those other neo-realists, de Sica or Rossellini, is of the wife, rejected
by her lover, falling asleep like a bereft child among piles and piles of dirty
dishes, the collective debris of a failed celebration.
Illustn'ous Corpses,
Francesco Rosi
If
Obssessione
deals in the poetics of obsession and frustration,
IIIus–
tn'ous Corpses
frustrates the viewer because of a failure of narrative strategy.
An elegant, apparent detective story, tantalizing for about two-thirds of the
way, Rosi's grim film refuses to resolve its own mystery, leaving us instead
with the radical banality of universal conspiracy-paranoid politics as usual.
It
reminded me of Pakula's
The Parallax View
in that it assaults and deceives
the viewer in order to demonstrate the purity of its cynicism. The distaste
it leaves overrides any minor pleasures.
Fear o/Fear,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder's films tend to deal with problem subjects (e .g., a lonely
young Arab marries an old woman), and are full of melodramatic gesture,
yet are visually cool and hard-edged . The mode is at ironic odds, almost at
reckoning, with the apparent subject matter and the films are at once serious
and self-mocking, not alternatively bur at the same time . The problem
