Word: viscontis
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Directed by LUCHINO VISCONTI Screenplay by SUSO CECCHI D'AMICO, ENRICO MEDIOLO and LUCHINO VISCONTI...
...neurotic and slightly hysterical." It seems a most unlikely confession for Burt Lancaster to be making, but then there is nothing likely at all about Conversation Piece, Luchino Visconti's latest movie. Hearing Lancaster speak those lines early in the film and watching later as he ostensibly grows sick and faces death, there is the inescapable sense that the actor is speaking for, even standing in for, the film maker himself...
...nearly 70, Visconti has been seriously ill for several years. Conversation Piece, made entirely in a studio, as if to spare the director the rigors of working on location, is about losing touch with life...
...Then Visconti assumes a more somber tone. Konrad turns out to be a person of radical political persuasion. Helmut Berger is a conspicuously unreliable man to get close to in a locker room, much less in a demonstration; he is nevertheless required to convince us that he "threw himself into the student movement." This background, which is about as likely as Jean Cocteau in his youth going three rounds in the Golden Gloves eliminations, rather diminishes the credibility of Visconti's entire enterprise...
More seriously, Visconti forsakes the wit of the opening for a kind of tongue-tied general valedictory. He is interested not so much in exposing his characters as having the Professor embrace all of them, opening his arms to their indulgences and sanctioning their moral impotence. "You could be my family," the Professor tells them all almost longingly, weighing his cloistered life against their wasted ones and finding that his own is wanting. For both Visconti and his protagonist, it is the conclusion of a numb and desperate...