‘A Quiet Place in the Country’ or — In Praise of the Other Mastroianni?
Elio Petri’s ‘A Quiet Place in the Country’ (1968) makes it blindingly clear from the get-go that its title is heavily ironic because there’s absolutely nothing quiet or bucolic about any of this in the bloody slightest. We’re immediately hit with an opening credit sequence that’s an intentionally aggressive bombardment of avant-garde visual data consisting of text, numbers, abstract art, mutilated Goya, Francis Bacon and Magritte and all accompanied by an atonal score that sounds like your mind is collapsing. This is not an invitation. It’s an out-and-out challenge.
Based on the Oliver Onions short story ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ (which influenced Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ possibly more than Stephen King’s novel did) Petri’s film concerns an abstract action painter, Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero), who, in an attempt to overcome a creative block, moves into a remote mansion in the countryside. Whilst there he becomes fascinated with an abandoned nearby villa where, according to rumour, a beautiful woman called Wanda was killed during a WW II airstrike.
As Ferri digs deeper into Wanda’s past so, it seems, the ghost of Wanda is intruding into Ferri’s present, specifically in the form of violently jealous attacks towards Ferri’s girlfriend/manager, Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave). But are these disturbances supernatural in nature or the product of an artist’s disintegrating sanity?
To be honest, the whole supernatural angle is almost entirely irrelevant with Petri fully aware that such an unrealistic explanation would not only be unsatisfying but also ultimately boring and meaningless. Instead, its implied possibility is used as a way to keep everything ambiguous which, by extension, increases the tension.
This is best demonstrated in the astonishing scene where a mysterious, unseen presence enters the villa at night and destroys Ferri’s studio in a rampage of flying paint (imagine if the monster from the Id from the 1956 film ‘Forbidden Planet’ decided to do a crazed Jackson Pollock piece one evening). The implication is that Ferri himself was responsible but if that’s the case then how come his snow white pyjamas are spotless (too spotless?) the following morning? There’s something going on here, it just needn’t be supernatural in nature.
Instead, this unconscious violence seemingly stems from Ferri’s inability to reconcile the creative process with the commodification of his art along with a fear of sexual inadequacy (the film opens with a dream-sequence of Ferri tied and bound to a chair whilst Flavia places consumer products such as electric alarm clocks and food processors at his feet) as opposed to any spectral forces, and this tension is the main thrust of Petri’s film (if Ferri is above such lowly capitalist goals then why does he have a Coco-Cola vending machine in his studio?).
As Ferri’s mental state continues to fracture and shatter so does the film itself and these splintered shards, as with Robbe-Grillet and Godard, are dense with audio-visual information. And this isn’t just down to Petri’s artistically acute eye or Ennio Morricone and the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza’s incredible improvised score but also Ruggero Mastroianni’s ferocious editing (Ruggero Mastroianni was the brother of actor Marcello Mastroianni and, quite possibly, the greatest editor Italy ever produced and boy, is that apparent here!). This is not a film where the soundtrack and editing are intended to be invisible but aggressively and disorientatingly in your face. For example — “I want you to have the house,” Redgrave whispers to Nero near the start, “I want you to be happy,” only for Petri and Mastroianni to immediately hard cut to Nero frolicking through a bright green field of grass like an over excited puppy.
Elio Petri is, without a doubt, one of my favourite filmmakers so I never need much encouragement to repeatedly dive back into his movies, and I’ve watch this one three times in the last week: the first viewing left me reeling at what I’d just seen; the second was to figure out what the hell I’d just seen; the third was purely for the aesthetic pleasure of it all. And the aesthetic pleasure of ‘A Quiet Place in the Country’ is stimulating, exhilarating, frantic and intense in the extreme.
The more I watch it the more I fall in love with it.
