Saturday, May 10, 2008

Un Tranquillo posto di campagna (Elio Petri, 1969) aka A Quiet Place in the Country



A Quiet Place in the Country (Elio Petri, 1969)
Rating: 8.3

IMDB keywords for the film include:
Necrophilia
Fetishism
Sadomasochism
Asylum
Ghost
Seance

The film also boasts a pretty incredible list of talent including an original avant- garde score by Ennio Morricone, actress Vanessa Redgrave, and a story provided by the legendary Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra whose amazing laundry list of writing credits include films for Antonioni (L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, Blowup, The Red Desert), Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, as well as films for Angelopoulos (Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist, Ulysses' Gaze, Eternity and a Day, The Weeping Meadow), and many more. A Quiet Place in the Country is the story of an artist who purchases a country villa in order to escape the city and focus on his work. The film is very atmospheric and in many ways very similar to The Shining. It is also very psychedelic and surreal and even plays with dualistic ideas between realism and surrealism; Redgrave's character is labeled as the practical realist, whereas Leonardo (Franco Nero) is an eccentric painter on the brink of insanity.

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