Luchino Visconti | L'innocente (The Innocent) / 1976

 

the monster

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Enrico Medioli, and Luchino Visconti (screenplay, based on The Intruder By Gabriele d’Annunzio), Luchino Visconti (director) L'innocente (The Innocent) / 1976  

 

Unlike works such as Obsession (1943), The Earth Will Tremble (1948), White Nights (1957), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Damned (1970), Death in Venice (1971), Ludwig (1973), and Conversation Piece, in all of which openly homosexual director Visconti featured gay issues, in the manner of his costume melodramas such as Senso (1954), and The Leopard (1963), his last film The Innocent retreats to mainly a heterosexual romance with very little if any gay content.

 

    The story, one might argue is in fact about a truly sexist, wealthy straight man, Tullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini) who has long ago left his pretty bride Giuliana (Laura Antonelli) to engage in sexual affairs with other women, the most recent of which is the beautiful Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill), a affair resulting in such an obsession that he tells his wife quite openly that he is leaving her for a while to explore their relationship, insisting that she remain in the family mansion in Rome while he moves quite literally in the mistress.

      From the beginning—as he attempts to explain that she must have known of his affairs and if she still loves him she will continue to accept them, describing her as a sister, mother, and friend instead of the intelligent and suffering woman that she is—we realize just how selfish this “monster,” as Teresa describes him at film’s end, truly is. The late 1890s women like Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House had few choices in a world in which were pampered and worshipped but treated like the world, as a Letterboxd commentator described it, is “filled with luxurious fabrics: wallpapers; crisply ironed; custom suits; brand new dresses; wraps and veils of the finest silks and furs and tulles” in which she dresses and is surrounded as if she were simply one of Tullio’s thousands of possessions.

 

     The wealthy upper classes of which the Hermils are part during the Belle Époque were filled with dinner parties, concerts, operas, and male activities such as fencing (in which Tullio is engaged) as well as long dinners all overseen by an immense army of servants. It was this world which brought about World War I and ultimately opened the way for the fascism of the 1930s and 40s, a world into which Visconti was actually born but later rebelled, becoming a Marxist.

       Tullio sees himself almost as a Nietzschean figure, rightly standing apart from the bourgeois moral standards of the lower classes. He stands as an atheist and opponent of their moral scruples, permitting himself, like others of his friends, to declare himself free to do what most pleases him, in his case engaging in temporary sexual affairs with women.

 

       Teresa, unlike Giuliana and her friends, also sees herself as a free spirit, a sort of ur-feminist, yet she too is trapped by her love for Tullio, unable to fully engage fully with his utterly sexist, selfish behavior.  

       The relationship between the two of them, despite their continued obsessions with one another throughout the film, ends in only a few months.

       But in the meantime, lonely, depressed, and rejected, Giuliana has begun an affair with a well-known author, Filippo d'Arborio (Marc Porel) introduced to her by the young military officer, Federico Hermil (Didier Haudepin), Tullio’s brother.

 

        That love affair, filled for her with guilt and moral compunction, also does not last long, but in the process she becomes pregnant. Now staying in the country with Tullio’s devoted mother, Marchesa Mariana Hermil (Rina Morelli), Giuliana is startled by her husband’s sudden return after his breakup with Teresa, she ordering that they sleep in different rooms.

         At first he is still someone indifferent to her, demanding she visit what was to be their original county mansion where, having lost his current mistress, he attempts to make over his somehow changed wife and more sensuous wife. But when she demands they return back to the Marchesa’s home instead of staying for the night because she is ill, his mother finally calls the doctor for her, admitting to her son that—although she has been sworn to silence about the subject—that Giuliana is pregnant, she believing that the baby is her son’s offspring.

 

      Tullio, however, knows that that cannot be case and soon discovers that she has had an affair with the noted author. Suddenly he is jealous, intrigued, and shocked, demanding that she get an abortion, attempting the reclaim her now as the mistress she has never been allowed to be in his house.

       At first, Giuliana wavers, but finally perceives his request as a kind of criminal act that despite his arguments for moral freedom and moral superiority, she cannot embrace. She returns with him soon after to their mansion in Rome, but refuses to agree to his demands of an abortion, and suddenly this totally selfish being displays his own bourgeois values, terrified of the scandal of her affair and of what raising a son that is not his night mean.

     Through his brother Federico, he attempts to arrange a meeting with Filippo d’Arborio, but Federico soon reports back that he has been sent by the military to Africa where he has contracted malaria from which soon after he dies.

       Giuliana bears a baby boy, but neither of them in their attempts to reestablish their relationship, will even see him, leaving him with the servants, although both sneaking in during nights to watch over him or cuddle the newborn.

      When Tullio, however, observes that Giuliana has been doing this, he is furious in the belief that her love of the child means that she is still in love the child’s father. In an attempt to allay his anger, she explains that she has hated the child, not loved it, and hopes that the two of them can soon leave the house and travel.

 

    While Giuliana, her mother-in-law, and the nanny attend a Christmas mass, Tullio sneaks into the child’s room, opens the window wide, pulls away the innocent’s covers and lays him near the cold air. Soon after, they discover that the child has stopped breathing.

     Knowing what her husband has done, Giuliana finally leaves him, again somewhat like Nora, to make her way alone a world that will surely be devastating for her, particularly after such a pampered life. Tullio attempts to return to Teresa, who toys with him after he has invited her into his mansion; after a few glasses of champagne explaining to him that she could not possibly again begin a relationship with such a selfish monster who, as she puts it, lifts up women with hand only to tear them down with the other.

       Tullio, who for the first time in his life not able to get his way, takes out a gun, goes into the room and shoots himself in the heart, presumably demonstrating, once more, how right he was about his willingness to live a completely independent life.

 

      Seeing what he has done, Teresa gathers up her purse and coat and runs from the house.

    As critic Jeremy Carr noted in Senses of Cinema, “Tullio’s chauvinism engenders him as a most unlikable protagonist; he is pompous, hypocritical, and reckless.” And yet there is something painfully tragic about his complete blindness to the world around at the expense of all others. One might argue that he represents the essence of heterosexual macho behavior, while being simultaneously a representative of the world that defined itself as educated, exquisite, and refined.

      In his constant womanizing Visconti’s despicable hero could hardly be seen to have any connection to the gay world. Yet, Tullio, in his deep male relationships, his dismissal of woman as anything but objects, and particularly in his perception—despite his truly deep sense of cultural and social conformity—of himself as a true outsider echoes with some gay overtones. If nothing else the fussy, overwrought feminized house that Tullio has created—not unlike Visconti’s own very personal hands-on approach to the rich tapestry of sets his film creates—says something about his sensibility. Tullio’s sexual activities are not really so very different those of many gay men before the shifts of the new century, selfish in their attendance to only their own sexual needs and the expense of deeper relationships, many gay men and lesbians being unable to maintain a monogamous or committed relationship in their need to satisfy only their own desires. In some respects, many of us wore this as a badge, proving us different, more open, and freer than the heterosexual society. And to a certain degree this may be true, being unconfined by the institution of marriage.

      In one scene at his fencing club when d’Arborio, after fencing with Tullio, showers and appears in a full-frontal nude scene (far more explicit than the nude scenes Visconti shows of women, and this in 1976), it appears almost as if Tullio cannot keep his eyes off of him, sensing perhaps that d’Arborio, also described as somewhat of a ladies’ man, has something deeper about him than he does, and perhaps may be more manly and attractive. Other nude males appear in the background.

   Moreover, the character of Federico, Tullio’s younger brother, who has a deep relationship with D’Arborio, describes his friend in a manner that appears to be more than a simple male bonding, arguing to Tullio of the man’s greatness, the only person, he claims, who has made him ashamed.

      In part, he is ashamed for the fact that even with all of their education and money, he and his brother have certainly not offered much to the world, while at least d’Arborio has given the society literature. Indeed, Tullio’s put-down of d’Arborio, and his refusal to explain why he has so wanted to meet up with the writer leads Federico to leave the house during their Christmas celebrations, explaining that he does not like what is happening in the situation, suggesting that there is something he cannot live with in his brother’s house.

      Earlier, when Federico discovers that his brother is soon to be a father, he comments that finally he can stop his mother from constantly trying to push him into marriage—presumably to create an heir apparent of which Tullio has not been able to—marriage being a union in which he is clearly disinterested. Although he and his friends also show up to events with women, their girls in their case are clearly temporarily decoys, obviously prostitutes tarted up for a dinner with these dashing military men, who like so many soldiers, sailors and others were forced, despite their intense camaraderie with other men, often sexual, to show themselves in public with women. It seems quite apparent, if nothing else, that Federico and d'Arborio’s friendship is deeper than any kind of relationship in which Tullio is capable. And at one point, when Tullio expresses the fact that he is suffering from things he cannot talk about, Federico responds angrily, “I have my own problems.”

       If Visconti’s film cannot precisely to said to express any openly gay situations, they hover somehow in the background, casting a kind of pall across all the plots of heterosexual melodrama. Interestingly, in interviews with both Ira Sachs and his co-writer Mauricio Zacharias, both mention the influence of Visconti’s The Innocent on their own gay film Passages, in which the central character is similarly un-likeable. Sachs claims that Visconti’s film provided them with their film’s structure, and even argues that in some respects, Passages was a remake of Visconti’s film.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).