Italy, France, 1963
Directed by Luchino Visconti
With Burt Lancaster (Prince Don Fabrizio Salina), Alain Delon (Tancredi Falconeri), Lucilla Morlacchi (Concetta Salina), Rina Morelli (Princess Maria Stella Salina), Claudia Cardinale (Angelica Sedara), Paolo Stoppa (Don Calogero Sedara), Romolo Valli (Padre Pirrone)
Latin cadences are wafting into the golden air of Sicily from a palazzo’s room the camera approaches with slow sliding motions until it eventually steps in through a French window; it then circles around, capturing all the people attending to this late afternoon prayers the priest fervently reciting the holy text that fills the pages of the big old book lying open on an armchair before a middle-aged man who is at the center of the room and of the attention; but coming from the vast space outside the room and the screen rackets and shouts increasingly disturb the quiet atmosphere, distract some and eventually cut short the ritual.
The perfect illustration of the first lines of the eponymous novel by Giuseppe Tommaso di Lampedusa the film adapts this scene introduces the audience to a world that basks in traditions of social order shaped by piety and paternalism. That middle-aged man at the center of it all is Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, a noble of ancient and distinguished lineage; the people around him is his close relatives, including his wife Princess Maria Stella and their seven children, some of them already at the end of their teenage years, and most of the servants who are compelled to share the same religious duties their masters observe as result of a strict education the priest who assists them, Padre Pirrone, strives to uphold.
But this world is wobbling as the wider Italian peninsula is changing. The commotion that marred the private ritual has been caused by gardeners finding a dead soldier in the park. This is the first direct consequence for the Salina family of the great event engulfing their isle: the onslaught by the Red Shirts fighters led by Giuseppe Garibaldi on the little monarchy then ruling Sicily and Naples to help the peninsula getting united under the crown of the King of Piedmont and Sardinia and his liberal cabinet. History is in the making in this spring of 1860 and Sicily is set to become just another region of a wider and modern regime.
The film is the chronicle of the way Don Fabrizio copes with those changes and the sentiments they elicit in this hard-hitting, hard-nosed and hard-working noble. As best as he can, it could be argued, but what is remarkable is that he rather seems to deal with them vicariously. He is as caught in the political dynamics as anyone else but barely minds to rise to any challenge and get any benefit – when the Italian unity is a done business and a national government’s envoy reaches out to the Prince to offer him a seat in the new Senate Don Fabrizio refuses and instead lectured his interlocutor on the near-impossibility to change the mindset and mores of a people just asking others to be left alone and to keep sleeping through the times.
What the Prince sees, at first reluctantly and then keenly, in the political change, is the opportunity to help his nephew rise in the new society, earning back the fortune the Falconeri family has lost and getting the best political and social position. The way the camera introduces Tancredi Falconeri’s character is telling and tellingly significant: Don Fabrizio is quietly shaving in his bedroom, looking at a small rectangular mirror put askance on a shelf, speaking alone it seems when suddenly a younger, brightly smiling face appears on the mirror, like an odd reflection – a stunning effect. Till the end Don Fabrizio behaves as if Tancredi was a son, emotionally speaking, and perhaps a double, socially speaking, and the audacious, dashing young man enjoys the attention – meanwhile the film barely examines the Prince’s other relatives, including Concetta, the sensitive daughter who loves Tancredi and would be spurned by him (a key development of the novel).
It is another female face that actually alters the narration and reorganizes the narrative. Once the context and the dynamics are established, the film is quietly cruising through incidents showing how the island is conquered and how the Salina clan lives through the events in a broad sweep mixing vivid reconstructions of street fights with domestic vignettes getting a comic touch thanks in part to the awkward attitudes of Padre Pirrone and the gentle cynicism of Don Fabrizio. It is a well-done work, an ambitious cinematic narration achieved by great attention to details and a confident, even relaxed, camerawork. The pictures are worthy of a well-organized international production and display the know-how of a fine director who has already shot a fine period piece dealing with the national history and laced with an intensely romantic story based on a famous book (that was “Senso” in 1954).
But when Angelica Sedara comes, the camera suddenly gets more emotional and dramatic. The intensity it conveys, largely deriving from actress Claudia Cardinale’s pout, gaze, dress, magnetism, signals of course the passion the young woman would stoke in both the old man and his nephew, a passion that would unite them till the very end. It heralds the contents of the second part of “Il gattopardo – The Leopard”: Angelica soon stands at the center of the reckonings and maneuvers of the Prince to help Tancredi while her sentiments for Tancredi become a whole chapter of the Salina saga. The playful and tender way both young folks are seducing each other gives the long narrative caper-like, charming moments that are counterpoints to the fresh impetus given to politicking and the struggle to control the events. It is not socially or morally a pleasant task for the Prince but he strives to make a bond and seal a deal with Angelica’s father, Don Calogero Sedara, a cunning wealthy bourgeois who has bet a lot on the new regime and seems apt to cash in many benefits. That part of the film is a lively and realistic tour in a changing political landscape using the small village where the Salinas go for summer vacations as a microcosm.
The last section centers on an endless ball, a splendid show of lavishness, elegance and confusion that runs a stunning gamut of emotions – though the whole sequence, however masterfully edited it is, feels a long-winded, self-conscious emotional conclusion. This ball turns out to be the first social occasion for the newly-wed Angelica to appear with Tancredi, who sees this kind of event as the launching pad for a political career. It unfolds in the shadow of Garibaldi’s failure to take the Rome region, still ruled by the Pope, in the battle of Aspromonte in August 1862, and, as conversations make clear, the ball symbolizes the success of the pragmatic liberal rule of the Piedmont government, celebrating the Sicily nobles smart enough to rally the new regime and burying dreams of the kind of romantic, rebellious national revolution Garibaldi still wanted to embody – and a brief confrontation between Concetta and Tancredi hints at how quick to pledge allegiance to this new order the young man is and how cynical, actually, he has always been.
But the film casts the event into another light: as the dusk for a life, the last moments of the lead character. When Don Fabrizio, wearied and ill at ease, hides away in a study room and contemplates a painting about the last throes of a man, the sense that his story is reaching an end is inescapable. This feels like the apex of a motif that has run through the film, especially in the second part: shots that capture a somber mood, a melancholy state, a sudden anxiety as the Prince is collecting his thoughts, pondering over what he has heard or said – but this time he has no one else in front of him, except that painting and a huge looking glass (again). For the last time the camera puts him in face of his youngest alter ego, this time in the company of that gorgeous feminine face that was such a turning point in the narrative and the sentiments animating the film – the attraction Don Fabrizio has always felt for Angelica is fully expressed and Tancredi can rightfully feels jealous.
But time is to draw the curtain: the wonderful waltz danced by Angelica and Don Fabrizio is just an ultimate show of grace and authority. The Prince, at the end of the ball, would rather go alone, without his relatives and a carriage, walking through the dark streets, meeting a priest hurrying to attend a dying person, frightening a cat, fading away in a distant corner. After all, the new world has never meant much to him – it was just an unpleasant reality he faced down to give a prodigal son a chance and to keep old family names a new lease of life. And of course that finale is in keeping with the thrust of the narrative as heralded by the initial scene: the picture of a man who has always been at the center of it all.