Italian upper class environment in the 1960's: beautiful houses and interiors, women of course also and so well dressed but, as in Dolce Vita, bored and wont to indulge in ambiguous erotic games - exciting for some and decadent for others. Mastroianni and Dunaway meet in such a venue before the evening festivities begin and fall in love and escape to the mountains at Cortina. The director Vittorio De Sica keeps the film viewer at a distance by introducing a "third party", the breathtakingly beautiful mountain scenery. Intense love and imminent death of one of the lovers is not an unusual story. Through the beautiful photography, the cool and tight directing of De Sica, one senses that the dangerous mountains will provide the ending. The acting does not drag you in willy-nilly to experience ardently the emotions but leaves you to decide how you would have acted in such a tragedy. Some might agree with the American critic Maltin who found it pseudo romantic slop, others with a European sensitivity may decide like the lovers or remain ambiguous, but definitely not unmoved by their own thinking and their own feelings.
Review of A Place for Lovers
