“UN TRANQUILLO POSTO DI CAMPAGNA”
- Italy/France, 1968
- Director: Elio Petri
- Writers: Tonino Guerra, Elio Petri, Luciano Vincenzoni
- Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller
- Soundtrack: Ennio Morricone
- 1:42:34
- Italian (no subs)
Petri’s erotic, intellectual horror film, winner of a Special Jury Prize at Berlin in 1969, offers a harrowing, hallucinatory account of an artist’s descent into madness. Franco Nero stars as a successful abstract painter who heads out for a peaceful, rural idyll with his mistress-turned-manager (Vanessa Redgrave) only to become unhinged by his growing obsession for the ghost of a murdered woman (Gabrielle Grimaldi) that haunts their holiday villa. The film’s striking canvases are by the American artist Jim Dine, and the original score is from noted film composer Ennio Morricone.
«The script of A Quiet Place in the Country dates back to ‘62; I wrote it with Tonino Guerra but I could shoot it only towards the end of ‘67.
The reason why I defend A Quiet Place in the Country is because it is the portrait of an artist, of a middle-class intellectual and of his division. He was a middle–class artist who, as far as his expressive means were concerned, tried to upset forms and formulas and who found himself prisoner of a serial production system. Thence his escape towards the ghosts of romantic culture.
The film was a criticism of the intellectual, indeed from the inside. In short, we were on the threshold of ‘68 and this is my last film before Investigation; that is before making films I could feel were useful to some cause.» (Elio Petri, from the book “L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano”)
