Bouquet to Non-Beats

Violent Summer (Titanus; Film-Around-the-World) is, according to Italian Director Valerio Zurlin,. "an old-wave picture in its way of recalling and filtering images." Instead of empty-souled profligates or angry young lathe operators, the film shows a pair of lovers, sensitively played by Eleanora Rossi-Drago and Jean-Louis Trintignant, enjoying a little measure of happiness at an Italian seaside resort in the troubled summer of 1943.

The heroine and her haughty mother are sharing a villa on the beach at Riccione when word comes that Eleanora's husband has been killed in action. Dawdling around the docks is Trintignant, who, thanks to his Fascist father's political connections, has dodged the draft. He is years younger than Eleanora, but against a wistfully romantic background of coltish gaiety, parental protests, surf, sun, and sentimental period pieces like Temptation, they play out a long, sensuous, foredoomed affair.

Eleanora's aura of mature respectability, pitted against Jean-Louis' young yearnings, lends low-key drama to her languid, libidinous surrender. The violence in Summer comes with a hellish, heart-halting air raid at film's end, in which green-and-golden youth agonizes over red-and-black realities of war. The slaughter awakens in Trintignant compassion and duty; his suffering loses him Eleanora but gives him manhood.

Working in a delicate, naturalistic key, Director Zurlini seems to be tossing an old-fashioned bouquet to the memory of pre-beat youth. The English titles are trite, the story thin, but Zurlini has meshed his moods nicely, cast his players lovingly, and photographed them with shimmering beauty. It is because they are simple and plausible people that this slight cinema is also oddly touching.

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