Conversation Piece

Luchino Visconti's penultimate film is a hybrid of his earlier films, The Leopard (1963) and Death In Venice (1971) that manages to capture none of the charms of either. Burt Lancaster, star of The Leopard, returns to play a reclusive professor of independent means whose well-ordered existence is upset by the unwanted intrusion of a brash Contessa (Silvana Mangano, looking like she might have wandered off the set of Fellini's Satyricon) and her self-centred grown-up children.

Visconti once again returns to the melancholy themes of aging, latent homosexuality and the passing of worlds but if this variant looked commendable on paper his realization of it is ham-fisted (Visconti had just recovered from a serious illness prior to making it). Lancaster brings a stoic bemusement to his character that is quite watchable in itself but the gaggle of brats and prats that are supposed to represent the new generation of 1970s are universally irritating, steeped in the values and behavioural norms of the time, the interaction between the Professor and them never approaching credibility and  the film whilst often looking visually impressive suffers from insistent structural problems that inhibit any engagement.

 

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