Hues and Cries

LA GRANDE BOURGEOISE Directed by Mauro Bolognini Screenplay by Sergio Bazzini

What a difference color can make. In this lush, slightly feverish Italian drama, the color photography is not merely the medium, it is a potent metaphor. In scene after scene, Cinematographer Ennio Guarnier frames the setting--turn-of-the-century Bologna and Venice--in rich, painterly soft focus, but his colors are so intense that they almost seem to burn the film. Similarly, the leading characters--an eminent if controversial scientist and socialist, his beautiful daughter who is suffocating in a bourgeois marriage, his erratic lawyer-son who is so devoted to his trapped sister that he would kill for her--are creatures of grace and period charm, but their own picturesque passions are so tearfully intense as to sear their souls.

Even by Italian standards, the intensity tends to get out of hand, particularly in the otherwise compelling performance of Giancarlo Giannini as the son. Scarcely a ciao can be spoken without a soulful stare, a strangled sob or an eloquently twitching nose. The cool restraint of Catherine Deneuve, which on other occasions can seem maddeningly vacuous, here supplies a welcome relief. She is a fetching brunette in this film. Playing Giannini's sister, she floats through all the gnashing and weeping with a fragile and captivating serenity.

The story, which is based on a historical incident, turns on a double irony. Giannini is driven not by evil but by a warped nobility. In plotting the murder of Deneuve's cruel and boorish husband, he enmeshes his idealistic, freethinking family in an elaborate, tawdry scandal In turn, the forces of Catholic conservatism in Bologna, especially the police and press, are impelled by hysterical fear and hatred of socialism to pillory the entire family. As the old scientist (Fernando Key) muses bitterly: "A man who kills an other man commits a reprehensible act. But a society that kills a man, his family, justice -- that's even worse."

Unfortunately, La Grande Bourgeoise blunts this irony by masking the precise extent of each family member's guilt. The criminal and sexual involvements, including possible incest, are indicated in fragmentary, sometimes confusing glimpses and teasing hints. In trying to be both a crime puzzler and a cutting social study, the film ends up not quite as either. Yet, thanks partly to the powerful lyricism of its imagery, it fails on a higher level than many a glib little movie succeeds on.

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