Cinema: Ennui in Italy

Time of Indifference. Heavy rainfall sets the mood of movie dramas like this one. Worthless, once-wealthy people go walking in the rain or huddle in the Chekhovian gloom of their mortgaged Italian villa, gazing out at the drizzle. Someone plays the piano. Someone moves tentatively toward a hopeless sexual liaison. Someone keeps insisting that the important thing is for people to tell one another the truth.

The chief truth to emerge from Indifference is that Director Francesco Maselli and a random assemblage of famous players have marooned themselves in a torpid adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s first novel, published in 1929. A young beauty (Claudia Cardinale) and her brother (Tomas Milian) struggle vainly to find meaning or purpose in existence. Mother (Paulette Goddard, in a series of unflattering closeups) is a faded gentlewoman whose unscrupulous lover (Rod Steiger) has entered a bid for Claudia and the family estates. Meanwhile, an aging adventuress (Shelley Winters) arduously lures young Tomas to her bed. He acquiesces at last because all choices seem meaningless. Ultimately, meaninglessness infects the film as a whole, and Indifference is remarkable only for Steiger’s highly concentrated performance as a doughy but vigorous go-getter whose lechery lends an acetylene brilliance to several otherwise dismal scenes.