‘La Seduzione’ is a film practically contemporary with the famous Milieu trilogy directed by Fernando Di Leo, one reason (among many) why this film has never received the attention it deserves. Here we enter a genre of morbid (melo)drama to be read from an anti-bourgeois point of view, a strand that was rather exploited during the 1970s and which is now obviously unfeasible here in Italy, if only because of a series of uncomfortable and politically incorrect themes.
The story is set in Sicily (Di Leo shoots in and around Acireale) and is inspired by the novel ‘Graziella’ by Ercole Patti. Maurice Ronet plays Giuseppe, a man of the world who returns from Paris to his hometown after a long time, driven above all by the desire to see his ex-girlfriend Caterina (an always charming Lisa Gastoni) again. The two resume their relationship and the protagonist returns to frequent the home of this woman (now widowed for many years), a relationship, however, destined to explode due to the presence of a third party: Caterina’s teenage daughter (Graziella), a viscous and mischievous little girl capable of seducing Giuseppe with less and less subtle methods. When the rope snaps, the play takes a painful and heart-rending turn, the bitter antechamber to a shock epilogue (a finale as decisive as it is ruthless).
Fernando Di Leo guesses all the characters, even the likeable womanizer Alfredo (a Pino Caruso just back from ‘Malizia’), practically a tempting devil well embedded in the Sicilian society of the time. The same can be said of Graziella, a perturbing young woman in whose role we find Jenny Tamburi, preferred at the last moment to the exaggerated beauty of Ornella Muti (who would probably have seduced Giuseppe in a nanosecond). The direction is well above average, and right from the opening bars of the film there is an air of tragedy, a recurring leitmotif in the Apulian director’s cinema: with ‘La Seduzione’ we therefore slide deeper and deeper into a funnel where that bourgeois falseness impossible to eradicate flows in. The suffused eroticism and this scandalous young/adult affair contribute to nourishing these feelings, which are, moreover, corroborated by a series of dialogues that are never banal about disillusionment in sentimental relationships.
Even though Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Lolita’ (1962) is just around the corner, Fernando Di Leo reinterprets one of the thousands of controversial aspects of love in his own absolutely personal way, setting it all within a sunny southern setting (where the twisted social dynamics contribute to exacerbating resentments and contrasts). This is why ‘La Seduzione’ is an important work, a milestone in that sinful cinema whose wake was later exploited to good effect by so many other feature films made during that decade (‘Il Sapròfita’, ‘Labbra Di Lurido Blu’, ‘L’Immoralità’ and so on). First hormones, then (in case) family.
Paolo Chemnitz
Genre: crime drama romance
Cast
Lisa Gastoni: Caterina
Maurice Ronet: Giuseppe Laganà
Jenny Tamburi: Graziella
Antonio Guerra: Mimì
Pino Caruso: Alfredo
Graziella Galvani: Luisa
Barbara Marzano: Rosina
Soundtrack Luis Bacalov
