Valerio Zurlini - La Prima Notte di quiete aka Indian Summer (1972)

In Italy, the gambler and professor of poetry Daniele Dominici arrives in the seaside town of Rimini and is hired to teach for four months in the Liceu replacing another teacher. His relationship with his mate Monica is in crisis and he spends most of the time with his new acquaintances and gamblers Giorgio Mosca, Marcello and Gerardo Pavani. In classroom, he meets the gorgeous nineteen years old mysterious student Vanina Abati, who is Gerardo's girlfriend, and he feels a great attraction for her. They meet and know each other outside class, and they fall in love for each other. Their relationship leads to a tragic end.





This is forgotten Italian master Valerio Zurlini's third best film after "Family Diary" and "Le Soldattese." It features one of Alain Delon's very best performances and an equally good supporting one from Giancarlo Giannini. Delon plays a hard-drinking and gambling professor of poetry who is fascinated by the sullenness of a beautiful student(Sonia Petrovna) and gradually falls in love with her. He finds out through his gambling buddies that she is involved in a pornography-prostitution operation of some kind. Zurlini's great film uses a slightly over-the-top melodramatic style to delve deep into the existentialist despair of Delon's character as he hangs around the discos of a very liberal and swinging early '70s post-sexual-revolution Italy, depressed by all the empty people around him desperately trying to distract themselves any way they can. The underlying Antonioni-like theme of people trying to distract themselves and merge into a crowd rather than individuate and painfully grow is very similar to that of "Desert of the Tartars," a film that couldn't be more different than "Indian Summer" on the surface. Dario Di Palma's deep-focus color cinematography in this film is one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous displays of virtuosity this side of Carlo Di Palma's soft-focus work in Antonioni's "Red Desert." (IMDB comment)







La primera noche de la quietud
Alain Delon interpreta a Daniele Dominici, un docente erudito totalmente desencantado con la vida, jugador y bebedor, quien cambiará el rumbo de su vida al mudarse a la ciudad marítima italiana de Rímini. Convive con Mónica (Lea Massari) en una relación algo confusa. Para Dominici las cosas se polarizan de manera contundente cuando conoce a una hermosa estudiante: Vanina (Sonia Petrovna) de la cual se enamora perdidamente y quien es la prometida de un rico lugareño: el libertino Gerardo, aunque nada es lo que parece: tanto la joven en cuestión como sus nuevos amigos están involucrados en la prostitución y la mala vida. Estos sucesos llevarán a la trama a desenvolverse en un modo tan trágico como inesperado.







Sotto i segni della precarietà e della morte e in cadenze di melodramma disperato, è la storia di un naufragio. Ritratto di Daniele Dominici, professore di letteratura, angelo caduto e insabbiato, che arriva al capolinea della sua vita in una Rimini invernale. S'innamora di Vanina, sua allieva, vaso d'iniquità nel guscio di un'insondabile malinconia. C'è un eroe “maledetto” (memorabile il cappotto di cammello dell'intenso A. Delon), c'è un ambiente, un'atmosfera, ci sono i personaggi di contorno (tra cui spicca un ottimo G. Giannini), c'è una scrittura. Scritto con Enrico Medioli, il 7° e penultimo film di Zurlini conta sulla raffinata fotografia di Dario Di Palma, le musiche di Mario Nascimbene, le scene di Enrico Tovaglieri.





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