Un bellissimo novembre (1969)
Directed by Mauro Bolognini

Film Review

Although director Mauro Bolognini's best work was behind him when he came to adapt Ercole Patti's novel Un bellissimo novembre his penchant for crafting sublime and perceptive studies in the human condition was still very much with him, as was his capacity for making controversial cinema.  The film that he ripped from Patti's provocative coming-of-age novel, whilst certainly not Bolognini's finest, is a haunting evocation of a solitary's teenage boy's transition to manhood, one that depicts the intense psychological turmoil of sexual awakening with a blistering intensity and fierce sense of reality.

Gina Lollobrigida, then at the height of her powers and arguably the most ravishing diva in Italian cinema, has an almost unreal presence in Bolognini's film, and it is not hard to see why she becomes an irresistible object of desire for the young Nino, played with an unsettling inscrutability by a young Paolo Turco.  If Lollobrigida's Cettina represents the unattainable object of a teenage crush, Turco's Nino is an angelic-looking innocent possessed by demonic impulses.  Far from downplaying the novel's incestuous overtones, Bolognini underscores them, bringing a stark eroticism to the scenes in which Nino and his aunt gradually give in to a sordid mutual attraction.  In one memorable scene, Turco pours water over Lollobrigida dressed in a white petticoat; as the water soaks through the thin fabric, the actress's stunning physique is revealed, in a way that is far more erotically charged than the more conventional nude love scene that occurs later in the film.  In another scene, laden with symbolism, Nino is seen offering his aunt the mouth-watering fruit of a cactus.  Louis Malle's Le Souffle au coeur (1971) is unpardonably tame by comparison.

The fetid environment in which Nino lives, the boy's destiny already mapped out for him by his bourgeois Sicilian family, is palpably rendered by Armando Nannuzzi's atmospheric cinematography, which imbues the film with the stale smell of autumn throughout.  Like a wild animal trapped in a small box, Nino's desire for release develops into a powerfully destructive force, not unlike the volcano on which his adolescent drama is played out.  Whilst Un bellissimo novembre has its shortcomings (notably an ending which differs from that of the novel and fails to convince) it is a darkly compelling piece, one of cinema's most honest and sophisticated attempts to present the most traumatic phase of an individual's development, with all its Hellish cruelties and barbed delights.

Film Synopsis

After the death of his father, 17-year-old Nino is finding adolescence a traumatic and lonely ordeal.  One autumn, during a holiday on the slopes of Mount Etna, he finds he is strongly attracted towards his young aunt, Cettina.  Although married, Cettina has no children of her own and Nino's interest in her awakens her maternal instincts.  An intimacy develops between the two and Nino's liking for his aunt turns into an all-consuming desire.  When Nino discovers that Cettina is pursuing a secret affair with another man, Sasa, he is overwhelmed by jealousy and fails to comprehend his aunt's infidelity...