A Place for Lovers (1968)

I haven't covered many foreign language movies on the blog yet, but of the ones I have covered one was pretty decent, the other was an abject steaming pile of foul smelling horse shit. And although, initially, I had planned to skip over this one for the moment and move on to the 70's, I have today managed to find a way to watch A Place for Lovers that might only be mildly illegal. So even though I moved on to a new decade last month, I am quickly darting back to the end of the 60's with French / Italian language, and widely denounced, heavily criticised Romance movie: Amanti, or in English: A Place for Lovers. I will be watching the movie in it's native Italian language for authenticity... and because I haven't been able to source an English language version without severely breaking the law...

After about 6 odd minutes of Faye Dunaway wandering around looking forlorn, we are semi-introduced to her character; Julia (Faye Dunaway), who bumps into a very attractive Italian man at an airport, who is utterly infatuated with her immediately, despite her lying about being married, and gives her his address and phone number. After she spots said man on television talking about experimenting with new safety barriers for motor car racing (I promise I'm not making any of this up), she calls him and invites him to stay over at her massive mansion for 2 days. He obviously agrees. She then promptly goes to bed whilst he has a nap on the sofa. The following morning, presumably left sexually frustrated, when Julia asks "him" (and look, I know who it is but I'm waiting for the movie to name him) how he feels he proceeds to pull her on top of him and they go about having a few good romps all over the place, including in a field watched on by some small children... Later that evening, he... oh look it's Valerio (Marcello Mastroianni) but the movie hasn't named him... Valerio, reveals that he is married but that doesn't seem to bother Julia for... some reason... and they proceed to return to the huge mansion that we learn is actually owned by Countess Isabelle (?) and that Julia is a guest? They then proceed to attend some really fancy dinner where a man goes through a slideshow of historic sculptures (I promise I'm not making any of this up...) before pairing off in some kind of swingers ritual involving drawing playing cards! But when Julia draws a card that doesn't match his and seems quite game to run off for 7 minutes with some other random guest, Valerio (oh who is named for the first time in this scene!) throws a tantrum and storms off. Julia chases after him but Valerio leaves anyway having to be in Monza in the morning to play with new safety barriers at the racing. The following day, after completing his tests, Valerio spots Julia in the stands and the pair proceed to have a little bit of a tiff over last nights events but end up reconciling, with Julia presenting Valerio with a suitcase full of clothes and stuff she stole from one of the male guests and this... doesn't seem to trigger a red flag with Valerio for... some... reason... then there is a weird scene where Julia lies about stealing a razor and some lipstick in a Department store, which Valerio causes a big stink up over but it transpires she was just winding him up and they end up banging in a field again... but they get interrupted when a man shoots a duck and it freaks Julia out. After Julia's reckless driving nearly gets them both killed... they travel to this cute little shack in the mountains and, during "foreplay" Valerio scribbles on Julia's face with red eyeliner pencil for... reasons? And then tries to film her... actually that was kind of cute... After a couple of days of escapades, including joking about abducting a small baby... Julia awakes one morning and bursts into a flood of uncontrollable tears. Meeting up with Maggie (Caroline Mortimer), it is revealed that Julia has a terminal illness and that she had agreed to return to be hospitalized for her remaining few days but had instead chosen to remain in Italy to die. Despite protestations from Maggie, Julia refuses to return revealing, for the first time, that she has fallen in love, and convinces Maggie to also stay in Italy but refuses to tell Valerio that she is dying. After they drive back to the mountains, Valerio asks Julia why she has to return to America but Julia dodges the subject and then almost very nearly decides to kill them both in a murder suicide when she very nearly pushes herself and Valerio off the edge of a cliff, but just manages to hold back enough to avoid it, which naturally upsets Valerio so much that they end up banging each other shortly after... Later that evening, after Maggie arrives at the airport for the last flight to Milan, and Julie is a no-show she phones the cabin but Valerio answers the phone. Revealing to Valerio that Julie is incredibly ill, Valerio at first pretends not to know and although something is so obviously wrong, the pair try to ignore it with Valerio putting on the vacation movie the pair have been shooting before Julia finally cracks and reveals she hadn't said anything because she wanted to escape it all, and have Valerio look at her with anything else other than compassion, or words to that effect. The following morning, despite trying to pretend like everything is normal again, Julia can no longer look Valerio in the eyes, and after she makes an excuse to distract him for a few moments she leaves him behind at the lodge and drives away to the airport. But unable to leave Valerio without saying goodbye she phones him, but is unable to talk to him when a band starts to play in the background and ends up hanging up, emotional, causing Valerio to flee from the cabin on foot, making his way to the airport. Arriving at the airport, Valerio is unable to find Julia anywhere, until he remembers the cliffs. Making his way there, he finds Julia standing on the edge but as the pair gaze at each other for a moment, Julia has second thoughts and the pair drive off along the cliff trial, hand in hand.

This... this is a tough one for me. I'll be honest, I spent most of this movie admiring what a smart and dapper dresser Valerio was. That was honestly the part that interested me the most. I have covered a couple of Romance movies on the blog here now, some of them even pleasantly surprised me, but it is just not really my kind of thing and I kinda bounced between - this is utter, utter tripe - to - I can understand the complexity of the emotions here and the development of this relationship... and then back to this is utter tripe again. I don't have much of a frame of reference really. And I went into this mostly with no preconceptions, but I just... didn't get it. Nothing really happens.

From an analysis point of view, I was watching an Italian language version with English subs here, so take that into account, but acting-wise everything was mostly alright. Faye Dunaway basically had to spend 90% of this movie having to look away forlornly into the middle distance. That was mostly her act. But when called upon to be emotionally distraught and when called upon to go through an almost entire spectrum of emotions in a single moment, she did a pretty decent job of portraying that. Similarly Marcello Mastroianni did an entirely fine job of being the handsome, strong Italian love interest and when he had to get all firey and emotional he was able to do that but similarly did as good a job in expressing his more softer, sensitive side. Things got a little bit ropey towards the end with the big crescendo when both characters broke down when they found out Julia's secret, but similarly they did a good job of looking and acting really awkward around each other. So yeah, no issues there.

And genuinely, it felt like they had chemistry. Which is half the battle with a Romance movie. I've watched a film where the 2 characters have ZERO fucking chemistry and it was an awkward mess. But that wasn't the case here, I genuinely felt like Julia and Valerio had chemistry, right down to the twinkle in their eyes for each other. And that is not easy to do. And they honestly did well to portray their characters as having a romantic tryst. Things got a little bit vanilla when they were just trying to be normal people doing normal stuff, but it didn't completely spoil the illusion. They still managed to maintain a connection even then.

So ok, why did I find myself thinking "utter tripe" for most of the movie then? Well, it's just that it doesn't really go anywhere? The whole central focus of the movie, literally 1 hour 10 minutes of the run time is just them being... well... together? They don't do anything. The most action packed this movie gets is the dinner table and playing card swingers scene. After that is bland as bollocks. And when they do have little stuff going on it is that bat shit insane that it looks like it was made up by some super intelligent but not quite socially adjusted artificial intelligence... That being said, nothing really develops. And the movie really suffers for it. It becomes incredibly tedious. Even with no pre-existing plot knowledge going in, you can sort of guess what the climax of the movie is building to: why has Julia only got 10 days in Italy... what's the big reveal here. And when it finally does get delivered, I genuinely felt for a few minutes that the whole silly nonsense before it had been building to this one dramatic moment. But no, they made a bit of a hash of it really, everything fell apart and I felt second hand embarrassed.

And that's a shame. I mean, they had serious, serious amounts of work to do to develop this movie. Put things in it that actually happen. You cannot build a 1 hour 30 minute picture around 2 people just looking at each other. Stuff actually needs to happen. You could strip this right back, right back to about half hour and I don't think you would lose any major detail. But on the flip side, had this been more fleshed out, had more actual content, maybe a bit more character development, I think it could have been a much more decent movie. But instead it just felt like a really long perfume commercial or something...

Often the worst movies that I watch on this blog earn their title through either being insultingly dreadful, or completely lacking in an absolute key area. Most of them are bad for different reasons but can be broadly categorised into about 3 different areas: distastefully bad, technically bad, or boringly bad. And I'm not entirely sure where A Place for Lovers pigeonholes itself. Potentially the latter 3rd category, because I didn't feel like this was genuinely a bad movie. It was just completely lacking in substance and direction. It had a plot, yes, but that plot was just things happening. There wasn't really a narrative, there wasn't really a storyline. There was some semblance of a story yes but was it portrayed through events and character development. No. No it wasn't not really no. And when you strip all of that away and let a movie sink or swim on just having 2 characters in love being portrayed, what you are left with is just a incredibly sparse canvas in need of greater decoration and more detail. And ultimately, it sunk. Slowly. Strong 1 out of 5.