Cinema: Glum Gavotte

THE DIVINE NYMPH

Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Screenplay by A. Valdarnini and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Laura Antonelli is such a straightforward and cheerful girl, neither brazen nor falsely modest when called upon to shed her clothes, the high point, of course, of all her movies. So it seems a shame to place her in the lugubrious context of a picture like The Divine Nymph. The film is yet another period piece, this time set in Italy during the 1920s. One be gins to wonder if the people who produce Antonelli’s movies are under the impression that so lush a lady simply cannot be accepted in a contemporary context. Or it may be that her oddly innocent air prevents them from seeing her as representative of a more modern sexuality.

She is here involved with a pair of noble decadents. Terence Stamp plays the one who begins his affair with her imagining it will be yet another bored dalli ance of the sort in which he specializes.

He ends up so smitten that he resorts first to drugs, then to suicide in his despair over failing to gain possession of her. Marcello Mastroianni plays the one who ruined her when she was an adolescent, and still holds power over her.

The gavotte these three dance is a glum one, too stately in pace. Offstage, there are rumbles of Fascism’s approach, and doubtless the message is that private preoccupations of the sort described here made Mussolini’s triumph easy. But Director Griffi is more interested in art deco interiors than he is in that or any other theme. The result is an irritating and so porific film. Those in need of an Antonelli fix are advised to see Till Marriage Do Us Part a second time — at least it’s funny about decadence.

−R.S.