Word: spinola
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Paolo Spinola seems to have realized he had a non-film on his hands. It opens with four minutes of enigmatic action, no dialogue; this may be Spinola's deliberate smoke-screen intended to distract us from the great poverty of visual narrative forthcoming. In like manner, every bogged-down scene has people fiddle with things to keep the camera amused. They light infinite cigarettes, they jerk curtain cords, while they talk, talk, and talk...
Making his feature-film debut with La Fuga (The Flight), Director Paolo Spinola brings off one unabashedly lesbian love scene, but mostly his camera composes a critical essay on wealth, boredom, lovers, luxury flats, all the icons of fashionable corruption that Italian moviemakers love to hate. The rest of the movie is so elliptical that Giovanna's "tragic death," presumably by suicide, is never explained, and cues the physicist to recall more of her unhappy history in flashbacks pressed from a charred diary. Sad to say, the dead wife's darker secrets turn out to be less interesting...