Helmut Berger : Konrad Huebel
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Visconti's Crossroads
7/10
Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom
27 September 2010
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
"Conversation Piece" stars Burt Lancaster as a retired science professor whose life is turned upside down by the intrusion of a rowdy family of strangers.Director Luchino Visconti goes to lengths to stress Lancaster's seclusion. He's an American born Italian-American living in Rome and has long since settled into a life of quiet study, spending long days browsing his own private art collection. He has a live-in housekeeper and is occasionally visited by art tradesmen, but for the most part Lancaster lives a secluded, contemplative life, his house a tomb of memories, his body awaiting death.
Enter Bianca Brumonit, an Italian noblewoman who wishes for her daughter and son to move into the top floor apartment of Lancaster's mansion. Lancaster, of course, doesn't wish for her to move in, but after much argument eventually gives in. The lease will run a year and he will be well paid. But it turns out that Mrs Brumonit also intends for the apartment to be used by her boy-toy, a young lover and erratic Leftist called Konrad Huebel. When Mrs Brumonit's husband finds out about Konrad's existence, however, he gives her an ultimatum: divorce, or find a more suitable "extramarital lover".
Brumonit chooses divorce. Unfortunately Konrad doesn't like this. He's tired of being treated as a male hustler and is tired of life itself. He commits suicide, an act which finally gets all these damned strangers out of Lancaster's house and allows Lancaster to slowly and peacefully die himself. So, in typical Visconti fashion, what we have here is a film about very specific collisions. Collisions between classes, between cultures, between classical and modern, between young and old etc.
As such, Lancaster's house is clearly demarcated, downstairs secure and ordered whilst the "new order" upstairs is shown to be constantly expanding, building works not only slowly taking over and encroaching on the rest of the house, but destroying the very history, customs and artwork stored within. Meanwhile the Brumonit family is portrayed as the outdated remnants of a selfish aristocracy, the mother trying to retain her status and relevance by latching onto feisty youths who would have opposed her family during its heyday.
Like Visconti's own "The Leopard" and "The Damned", the film thus watches as a man witnesses his world vanish into modernity (in contrast to Visconti's "The Innocent", in which a man cuts himself off from the past by embracing a sort of Nietzschean hedonism and/or defiance). This has led to some believing that Visconti feared social change and romanticised the "old order", painting them as men of intellect, art and reason. But the film's web of relationships is too complex to be reduced to such simple binaries. It criticises both the old and the new, and paints Konrad as a sort of synthesis of the two, his inability to exist in these spaces, or synergize the two worlds, resulting in his death.
Visconti's question is, with the death of Lancaster and Konrad, who inherits Italy? The film's answer seems to be: the worst of both worlds.– Visconti's style had long since changed by this point, the energy of his early films ("White Nights", "Rocco and His Brothers" etc) giving way to an approach that's just too theatrical and dialogue driven. See Assayas' "Summer Hours" for a sort of modern masterpiece which covers similar material. Worth one viewing. 7.5/10
