A Quiet Place in the Country was nominated for a Golden Berlin Bear at the 1969 Berlin International Film Festival. The film was spearheaded by Italian director Elio Petri, stars Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave, and includes the work of Ennio Morricone. Billed as a sadistic and erotic horror film, it reminds me of Piero Schivazappa’s The Frightened Woman (aka: The Laughing Woman) which was released in 1969, a fitful year for Italian psychosexual thrillers. I’ll admit to preferring the latter to the former, but A Quiet Place in the Country is not without various selling points.
The story centers around Leonardo (Franco Nero), a modern artist who – despite plenty of kinky and game attention from his art dealer and lover Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) – craves a change of setting to stimulate his creative juices. Leo is drawn to a crumbling villa, which he buys in the hopes of finding peace away from the hustle-and-bustle of Milan, but mysterious footsteps, acts of vandalism, and ghostly maneuvers lead him to believe he is not alone. By talking to the villagers he begins to discover a bit more about the previous owner, a sexy and promiscuous countess by the name of Wanda Valier, who died 20 years earlier. It all leads up to a séance topped off with a flinch-worthy scene of violent delirium and a surprise denouement.
The cinematography by Luigi Kuveiller, laboring alongside cameraman Ubaldo Terzano (both also worked on Deep Red), is top notch, multi-layered, and open to poetic license that are never at a loss to add many indelible images. Editor Ruggero Mastroianni kicks things off at a bravura pace but knows when to let a scene breathe and slow down. For the most part, everyone does a good job of delivering a tale of artistic madness that may, or may not, involve a nymphomaniac ghost.
Given elements of obsession and voyeurism one might think Hitchcockian motifs would come to the fore, but Petri shoots his film with enough sixties brio and experimentalism to make this a very clear and original product of its own time and place. The story, based on a novella by British writer Oliver Onions called “The Beckoning Fair One”, updates the original Victorian setting to the Italian countryside. The first act feels a bit disjointed, but once Leo is established in his villa the story hits a comfortable stride marred only by the ill-advised use of loopy flutes during scenes of shocking violence.
Given how Leo terrorizes Flavia, it seems fitting that Jack Nicholson was once considered for this role of a man haunted by ghosts who goad him toward killing his lover. The scenes of rough sex between Leo and Flavia must not have traumatized Redgrave too much, as she and Franco later got married in 2006. It’s also fitting that Nero, who was once a painting photographer who was later cast as a coffin-dragging gunfighter in Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966) should here have a central role in a film that makes multiple references to René Magritte’s famous upright coffin.
A Quiet Place in the Country screens on TCM tomorrow.
