Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well known by the time Luchino Visconti began to work on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently translated into many languages—a German version is seen lying around in Visconti’s section of the four-part film Boccaccio ’70 (the other episodes were directed by Vittorio De Sica, Fedrico Fellini, and Mario Monicelli), released in 1962. Gradually, the fortunes of the two works became entwined, so that they now seem commentaries on each other in two different mediums, rather than one the source of a film or the adaptation of a novel.
Many have remarked on the affinities between Lampedusa and Visconti, with their aristocratic interest in fading splendor and dying worlds, and there is no doubt that the film is intimately faithful to the spirit of the novel—even when it shifts time lines and details of dialogue and inserts a whole battle sequence. A movie audience, Visconti said in an interview, needs to see Garibaldi’s men fighting the soldiers of the Bourbon government in the streets of Palermo and to see Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon), the nephew of the prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), fighting alongside the revolutionaries in order to perceive what is at stake: “the disruptive power of the historical conjuncture and the real risk Tancredi is running,” as the old order is overturned and a new Italy is born.
Both novel and film are ironic, elegiac, stately, and dedicated to a luxurious mourning for a lost past. But the loss and the past are different in each case, and the film is a good deal more political—more political than the novel, and more political than it may look at first sight. The most magnificent moments in the book involve a movement that Visconti does not make, and that a film perhaps cannot make persuasively: the flash-forward in time, the long look at the future beyond the story currently being told. We learn, for example, that the days of the engagement of Tancredi to Angelica (played in the film by Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of the rich and scheming upstart Don Calógero (Paolo Stoppa), a sequence of games and kisses played out in the dusty and abandoned rooms of the prince’s seemingly endless house at Donnafugata, were the best days of their lives because they were a time of unsatisfied and therefore ever-present desire, matched by nothing in their later careers. “Those days were the preparation for their marriage which, even erotically, was not a success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those melodies which outlive the forgotten works they belong to.” The long view doesn’t destroy the short view, but it draws out its sheer fragility.
Visconti’s film memorably records this romance and lingers with the lovers in the old rooms of the vast and ancient house; but the director has nothing to say about their future failures, and his eye is firmly on the present, on the allure of the couple, on Tancredi’s slightly too easy charm, on Angelica’s slightly too petulant beauty. The impecunious Tancredi, with the prince’s blessing, is marrying money; more than that, he is buying his way into a position of influence within the new Italy. In the novel the prince thinks Tancredi’s behavior is a little “ignoble” but admires the young man’s grasp of historical reality and allows his affection for him to quiet his scruples. The film identifies less closely with the prince’s point of view—it is about him, so to speak, but not an endorsement of his thinking—and if he is its visual center, Tancredi is the focus of its most troubling questions. It is through the modulations of Tancredi’s position, through his charm and his ruthlessness, that we understand the subtle political register of the film.
The convergence and divergence of Lampedusa and Visconti are particularly interesting here. Lampedusa is a Sicilian aristocrat deeply skeptical about progress; Visconti is a northern aristocrat deeply dedicated to it. But Lampedusa is too thoughtful a conservative to believe he can simply cling to the past, and Visconti is too intelligent a radical to believe all changes are for the better.
Burt Lancaster brings to the role of the prince an extraordinary physical presence but also a remarkable sense of the difficulty of growing old and losing political prestige—his graceful waltz with Angelica in the film’s fabulous ball scene, tenderly photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno, is the last dance of a whole social order. In this interpretation of the prince we see high style and perfect grace, but in the end he is leaving this world, and we are still living in it. Some critics have felt the film was too much about the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth—intimately, if indirectly, concerned with Italy’s relation to Europe as a whole in the early 1960s, with this later version of a conflict between a modernizing present and a vanishing past. Visconti himself, however, doesn’t make the distinction. Throughout the making of the film he asked himself, he said, whether the opportunistic Tancredi, if he had been born later, would have become a Fascist. This is a question not an answer; a fear, not an accusation. Tancredi’s charm and style are real, as is his deep affection for his uncle. But the question clearly haunts the whole film.
The query is posed at it sharpest through a sequence of cuts and juxtapositions, as befits a great movie. As he says goodbye to Chevelley (Leslie French), the representative of the parliamentary government of the united Italy, who has offered him a place in the newly constituted Senate—he has politely refused—the prince agrees that changes are coming but says they will be for the worse. “We were the leopards, the lions,” he says. “Those who will take our place will be jackals, hyenas.” Dismissive enough, but the prince goes on. “And all of us—leopards, lions, jackals, and sheep—we’ll go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” Chevelley’s coach leaves, and the next shot shows a hot Sicilian countryside, with laborers vigorously digging. Over this image we hear the rising sounds of an orchestra, and the next shot takes us to an elaborate ball in a palace in Palermo. The implication is that once the leopards and the jackals have started mingling, it will be hard to tell who is who. It’s clear that Sicily won’t change much but the jackals will certainly do well for themselves. More importantly, two extraordinary worlds will have died: the old order, represented (at its best) by the prince, and the revolutionary Italy, represented by the now wounded and sidelined Garibaldi. At the ball we hear of Garibaldi’s defeat by the soldiers of the very government he helped to put in place, and of the promised execution of several of his supporters at dawn. A good thing too, Tancredi the ex-revolutionary says. “It’s true, the new kingdom needs law and order.” He is lying on a sofa as he says this, the image of elegance and freedom from care. In the last images of the film, dawn has come; the ball is over. On his way home, the prince kneels on the street as a priest hurries past taking the sacraments to a dying man. In a coach, Tancredi, Angelica, and her father look tired and happy as they hear the sounds of the firing squad close by. The prince rises and walks slowly away from us.
“For things to remain the same, everything must change.” Spoken near the beginning of the film, the famous catchphrase simply suggests adaptation. For the prince and his class, a modified monarchy is better than a republic. As it echoes through the film, the phrase comes to mean something very different, and gets close to the heart of Visconti’s criticism of modern Italy. It means anything goes as long as we get to stay at the top of the political pile—whoever “we” are. This is not the prince’s world, but it is Tancredi’s. “You wouldn’t have spoken like that once,” one of the prince’s daughters says to Tancredi at the ball, when he talks so casually of the need for (and the cost of) law and order. “You’re wrong my dear,” he answers. “I’ve always spoken like that.” He has. He has changed his opinions and allegiances, but he has always spoken like a man who knows what’s necessary—for him, and, as Visconti would say, for the thousands like him to be found in many times and many places.
1963
185 min
Color
2.21:1
Categories: Film Essays
1 Comments
Tue 02 Jun at 07:50 AM
ENRICO GIORDANI
beautiful transfer, but should be better in Blu-ray. Do you plan to issue a Blu-ray edition code free?
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