Senso (1954)

 Luchino Visconti's "Senso"

The first thing that strikes you when watching Luchino Visconti's 1954 film "Senso" is the picturesque use of vibrant color. It lulls you in. I felt myself almost being able to fall into the textures of the film through the film screen. The lush colors and Visconti's masterful blocking and direction all create a sensual film that beckons to be adored. It's appropriate that the film is called "Senso," meaning "sense," "feeling," or "lust," because this film does embody this notion simply through its textured images alone. Beyond the image, its an incredibly operatic story about lust and desire and more specifically, tragic desire.

The film takes place in 1866 during the Italian-Austrian war of unification. A wealthy countess falls in love with a Austrian soldiers and spends the film meeting with him in secret as the occupying Austrian troops are being driven out by Italian revolutionists. It's a lustful, heated romance that turns our Countess, Livia, into an all-out obsessive over the Austrian lieutenant, Franz. After hiding him away at their family's estate, she gives him money that was meant to supply partisans fighting the Austrians so that he can bribe the army doctors into keeping him off the battlefield. After he escapes and heads back to Austrian-occupied territory, her separation from him begins to drive her mad. She risks it all and leaves home and is able to get past enemy lines to go see Franz. When she arrives at his apartment, which her money has paid for, she finds him drunkenly hostile and with a prostitute. He berates her and tells her he was never in love with her and that he was only using her. She leaves into the streets of drunken Austrian soldiers and feels her sanity slipping from her. She then goes and informs on Franz, letting the Austrian commanders know that he is a deserter. The final scene is him being executed by a firing squad. 

I think inside all of the sensational picturesque and painterly images of 19th century Italy lies something more thematic regarding the concept of 'senso' or 'feeling' or 'lust,' whatever you want to call it. I find that "Senso" appears to be an inverse of "Ossessione," Visconti's 1943 film debut (that also happens to be the starting point of Italian neo-realism). With "Ossessione," the characters become obsessed with each other and are driven to lust and passion through their deteriorating economic and social circumstances. Their love affair is almost like a tonic that softens the taste of the bitter reality of life. Poverty wraps around them, but their passion and lust for each other wares off this cognitive recognition of this poverty. The grainy, low-budget realism of the visual structure of the film aides in this dirty, uncomfortable environment that drives the characters to satiate it somehow. With "Senso," it is similar but environmentally inverted. With the terror of war and societal fallout surrounding them, the characters embrace the lust and romance of their affair to offer themselves a mental respite. Contrasted to the grainy, low-budget realist style of "Ossessione," "Senso" is quite the opposite with its painterly visage and lush color grain. Similarly, our Countess comes from wealth and abundance, which in tern is aided by this visual abundance. I think the key line in the film is at its climax when Franz is berating Livia and says "It was me who betrayed your cousin to the police. Of course, you know this, but pretended not to to save our love affair!" This concept lies the key thematic point of the film. The characters are choosing blind passion and ignorance to the cold reality of what's truly happening. Specifically, Livia. She creates this fantasy of Franz that doesn't exist and never existed. She betrays her family and leaves her wealth and comfort to chase this fantasy. It provides the passionate antidote to dealing with the harsh realities that have befallen Italy.

In this way, the film's visual style is completely intertwined with the thematic subject of the film. The film starts in an opera, full of vibrant colors, lush costumes, and dramatic flourishes of style. As a viewer, you fall into this style and become emotionally linked to the sensual textures of the entire film, drawn in to them. By the end, those lush textures are gone and have been replaced with the cold, empty and barren textures of the Austrian base. Our characters are still in an opera, but one that is an epic tragedy. Their world is now barren and lifeless, open to the cold winds of truth. The fabricated sensationalism of their world has now been replaced by the bitter, discontented discomfort of what is. Like Livia, we were drawn in. But the vibrancy and passion that drew us turned sour before our eyes and betrayed us. The fantasy was an illusion. The 'senso' was momentary and fleeting.