Valerio Zurlini is not a household name but he is a director I love, Here he has the great Enrico Medioli as his writing partner and Alain Delon as his leading man. Cold, arid, fascinating tale. From Delon's substitute professor to Sonia Petrova's beautiful student nobody ever smiles, or very rarely. The wonderful Giancarlo Giannini is the one that brings the color and the joy and Alida Valli provide us with one hell of a scene. Rimini is also a character, a cold Rimini, out of business and an air of Fellini's I Vitelloni in the air. Very rewarding in its desolation.
10 Reviews
more internal obsessions
cranesareflying3 April 2001
Warning: Spoilers
For the record, I believe that Violent Summer (Estate Violenta) is at or near the level of Family Diary (Cronaca Familiare), and features his most extraordinary scene, an unbelievable dance sequence where Jean-Louis Trintignant and his newfound love, Eleonora Rossi Drago, dance with other partners, eyes glued to each other, while the music of `Temptation' plays, only to end up in each other's arms.
*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****
I missed the viewing of Le Soldatesse, but The Desert of the Tartars (Il Deserto dei Tartari) was also a unique, remarkable, and powerful film. Perhaps after those films, The Professor (La Prima Notte Di Quiete) is another stunning film, not the least of which is how little time this particular professor, Daniele, Alain Delon, actually spends in class, instead he is a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and a bon vivant in the provincial town of Rimini. The party sequences in this film are quite extended, and feature the Zurlini theme of dancers staring daggers at others, NOT their dance partners. He has a long standing love affair with Monica, Lea Massari, who describes the strength of their relationship in terms of their `despair,' an incredibly astute remark, suggesting his newfound flame, the stunningly beautiful Vanina, Sonia Petrova, is a young, unrealistic expectation, as Daniele is really not capable of love, he is instead a tormented soul, and to prove it, she suggests she will commit suicide if he leaves her. So, of course, he walks out on her in an instant only to have second thoughts on route to his new love, perhaps realizing that he really only loves Monica, but dreams of the passions of Vanina, and in his internal torment, makes a crucial, careless, and reckless mistake that costs him his life, he gambles and loses. At his funeral, Zurlini reveals one of his most frequent images, Daniele's casket is surrounded by statues, living people who have the appearance of statues, dead souls that he has spent his life rejecting in a vain attempt to discover his own life, but the dead souls prevail in the end - cold, hard, slabs of rock, lifeless, inanimate objects that are permanently in a state of frozen disuse, another visually exquisite film that searches for the internal obsessions and motivations of it's characters.
Robert
*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****
I missed the viewing of Le Soldatesse, but The Desert of the Tartars (Il Deserto dei Tartari) was also a unique, remarkable, and powerful film. Perhaps after those films, The Professor (La Prima Notte Di Quiete) is another stunning film, not the least of which is how little time this particular professor, Daniele, Alain Delon, actually spends in class, instead he is a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and a bon vivant in the provincial town of Rimini. The party sequences in this film are quite extended, and feature the Zurlini theme of dancers staring daggers at others, NOT their dance partners. He has a long standing love affair with Monica, Lea Massari, who describes the strength of their relationship in terms of their `despair,' an incredibly astute remark, suggesting his newfound flame, the stunningly beautiful Vanina, Sonia Petrova, is a young, unrealistic expectation, as Daniele is really not capable of love, he is instead a tormented soul, and to prove it, she suggests she will commit suicide if he leaves her. So, of course, he walks out on her in an instant only to have second thoughts on route to his new love, perhaps realizing that he really only loves Monica, but dreams of the passions of Vanina, and in his internal torment, makes a crucial, careless, and reckless mistake that costs him his life, he gambles and loses. At his funeral, Zurlini reveals one of his most frequent images, Daniele's casket is surrounded by statues, living people who have the appearance of statues, dead souls that he has spent his life rejecting in a vain attempt to discover his own life, but the dead souls prevail in the end - cold, hard, slabs of rock, lifeless, inanimate objects that are permanently in a state of frozen disuse, another visually exquisite film that searches for the internal obsessions and motivations of it's characters.
Robert
Cold, Melancholic, Cruel and Tragic
claudio_carvalho13 January 2007
In Italy, the gambler and professor of poetry Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon) arrives in the seaside town of Rimini and is hired to teach for four months in the Liceu replacing another teacher. His relationship with his mate Monica (Lea Massari) is in crisis and he spends most of the time with his new acquaintances and gamblers Giorgio Mosca (Giancarlo Giannini), Marcello (Renato Salvatori) and Gerardo Pavani (Adalberto Maria Merli). In classroom, he meets the gorgeous nineteen years old mysterious student Vanina Abati (Sonia Petrova), who is Gerardo's girlfriend, and he feels a great attraction for her. They meet and know each other outside class, and they fall in love for each other. Their relationship leads to a tragic end.
"La Prima Notte di Quiete" is a cold, melancholic, cruel and tragic story, with magnificent performance of Alain Delon, perfectly developing the character of a desperate atheist man in existentialistic crisis. The beautiful cinematography and the music score are cold, as the environment of Rimini, Sonia Petrova is one of the most gorgeous actresses I have ever seen and is also perfect in the role of an young woman with a hidden past. The personal dramas are disclosed and developed in a slow pace and are very sad. Unfortunately there is no other movie available on VHS or DVD in Brazil of this great Italian director Valerio Zurlini, who seems to have been forgotten by our national distributors. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "A Primeira Noite de Tranquilidade" ("The First Night of Tranquility")
"La Prima Notte di Quiete" is a cold, melancholic, cruel and tragic story, with magnificent performance of Alain Delon, perfectly developing the character of a desperate atheist man in existentialistic crisis. The beautiful cinematography and the music score are cold, as the environment of Rimini, Sonia Petrova is one of the most gorgeous actresses I have ever seen and is also perfect in the role of an young woman with a hidden past. The personal dramas are disclosed and developed in a slow pace and are very sad. Unfortunately there is no other movie available on VHS or DVD in Brazil of this great Italian director Valerio Zurlini, who seems to have been forgotten by our national distributors. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "A Primeira Noite de Tranquilidade" ("The First Night of Tranquility")
Let's hope for a decent translation release
circagirl26 March 2020
I was forced to settle for an unbelievably awful home brew English subtitle pirated copy so my take away is more of an emotional impression than a deep understanding. Apparently Delon hated working with this director and it didn't click enough with audiences to ever get a proper international dvd release. Boo! That being said, the solemn, hopeless beauty of the outsider leads and their star crossed romance screams of untold potential. I just wish I had a better idea of what was going on than just an outline of depressed, lonely teacher + disillusioned young student + gambling problem + Italian mafia = tragedy. Seriously, the only available English subtitling is so bad that it was like reading the cliff notes of a mad man who is incapable of complete sentences.
Alain Delon and Giancarlo Giannini at their best in a fantastically photographed forgotten masterpiece
Aw-komon9 February 2001
This is forgotten Italian master Valerio Zurlini's third best film after "Family Diary" and "Le Soldattese." It features one of Alain Delon's very best performances and an equally good supporting one from Giancarlo Giannini. Delon plays a hard-drinking and gambling professor of poetry who is fascinated by the sullenness of a beautiful student(Sonia Petrovna) and gradually falls in love with her. He finds out through his gambling buddies that she is involved in a pornography-prostitution operation of some kind. Zurlini's great film uses a slightly over-the-top melodramatic style to delve deep into the existentialist despair of Delon's character as he hangs around the discos of a very liberal and swinging early '70s post-sexual-revolution Italy, depressed by all the empty people around him desperately trying to distract themselves any way they can. The underlying Antonioni-like theme of people trying to distract themselves and merge into a crowd rather than individuate and painfully grow is very similar to that of "Desert of the Tartars," a film that couldn't be more different than "The Professor" on the surface. Dario Di Palma's deep-focus color cinematography in this film is one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous displays of virtuosity this side of Carlo Di Palma's soft-focus work in Antonioni's "Red Desert."
Indian Bummer
Jeremy_Urquhart25 April 2024
I'm starting to gain more appreciation for Alain Delon after seeing some more of his 1970s work, because he's an actor who proved himself willing to take on more challenging and unexpected roles as he got a little older. I don't think age affected his looks too much (he's almost 40 here, and kind of made to look a little rough/disheveled, but is still typically dashing), but his roles earlier did sometimes feel a bit heart-throbby, admittedly still broken up by films like Le Samourai.
He's really good in Indian Summer, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. It's slow but effectively melancholic; not a fun film, but it works well as a character study.
He's really good in Indian Summer, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. It's slow but effectively melancholic; not a fun film, but it works well as a character study.
Alain Delon between social and existentialist drama
dromasca20 August 2021
'La prima notte di quiete', the 1972 film by Valerio Zurlini , has three different titles. It was released on the English speaking market as 'Indian Summer', a title that has an explanation somewhere in the film, but has little to do with what happens on screen. In France it is known as 'Le professeur'. The film is an Italian-French co-production, but can be considered as belonging to Italian cinema. It is the penultimate of the only nine feature films left by Zurlini, a director whose life and career have been roo short, enough to leave behind a few solid films, including this one, but no masterpiece. 'La prima notte di quiete' can be described as being somewhere between a romantic social drama and existential cinema. It is an interesting film, with many qualities, even if it fails to reach the peaks of those years by Pasolini or Antonioni, the masters of the respective genres in the Italian cinema of the time.
The film opens with a very beautifully filmed scene (like the whole film) on kind of a 'Quai des Brumes'. The lonely man by the sea is the literature teacher Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon), who has just arrived in the city of Rimini, which in this film looks more like a port city at the North Sea than on the Adriatic Sea. We are in the early '70s, in the midst of a sexual revolution, and the teacher has been in a relationship sprinkled with infidelity on both sides and routinely threatened by boredom for several years with Monica (Lea Massari), a woman his age (30+). He tries to balance his life with a passion for card games, which gets him in touch with the libertine underworld environment of the city. Daniele notices in his class Vanina (Sonia Petrovna), a 19-year-old young woman. The interest for the girl, who is beautiful and different from her colleagues, turns into attraction, and then into devouring passion, despite or maybe just fuelled by differences in age, class and culture, and by the dangerous environment and dubious entourage of the girl.
Zurlini planned to make out of this film a first episode in a more complex social and family saga, covering several decades of post-war Italian history. There are some clues in the film about the teacher's father, a venerated hero who fell in the war, and the ending broadens the context by alluding to the family that does not play another role in the plot. As this film remained the only one in the planned cycle, it remains rather a snapshot of a specific moment in the history of Italy - the early 70s - and of a well-defined social environment, that of provincial cities touched by a modernity with mixed consequences while facing a conservatism of another era that is struggling to maintain its influence. Alain Delon creates a role specific to this peak period of his career, that of the man who internalises his feelings in an inner boil. Sonia Petrovna is a fascinating partner, with a look foretelling Monica Bellucci, in the role of a brutally grown-up young woman. In addition to Lea Massari, Alida Valli, another legend of Italian film, also appears in an episodic role. Dario Di Palma's cinematography brings to life the image of a coastal Italy very different from that of tourist postcards. Some frames are anthological, such as that of the sea and the sky captured in the same grey colour and separated only by a restless horizon line. Mario Nascimbene's soundtrack uses copiously jazz music with saxophone and trumpet solos. There are many good reasons to see 'La prima notte di quiete' and just as many reasons to regret that this film remained just a building block of an unfinished edifice.
The film opens with a very beautifully filmed scene (like the whole film) on kind of a 'Quai des Brumes'. The lonely man by the sea is the literature teacher Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon), who has just arrived in the city of Rimini, which in this film looks more like a port city at the North Sea than on the Adriatic Sea. We are in the early '70s, in the midst of a sexual revolution, and the teacher has been in a relationship sprinkled with infidelity on both sides and routinely threatened by boredom for several years with Monica (Lea Massari), a woman his age (30+). He tries to balance his life with a passion for card games, which gets him in touch with the libertine underworld environment of the city. Daniele notices in his class Vanina (Sonia Petrovna), a 19-year-old young woman. The interest for the girl, who is beautiful and different from her colleagues, turns into attraction, and then into devouring passion, despite or maybe just fuelled by differences in age, class and culture, and by the dangerous environment and dubious entourage of the girl.
Zurlini planned to make out of this film a first episode in a more complex social and family saga, covering several decades of post-war Italian history. There are some clues in the film about the teacher's father, a venerated hero who fell in the war, and the ending broadens the context by alluding to the family that does not play another role in the plot. As this film remained the only one in the planned cycle, it remains rather a snapshot of a specific moment in the history of Italy - the early 70s - and of a well-defined social environment, that of provincial cities touched by a modernity with mixed consequences while facing a conservatism of another era that is struggling to maintain its influence. Alain Delon creates a role specific to this peak period of his career, that of the man who internalises his feelings in an inner boil. Sonia Petrovna is a fascinating partner, with a look foretelling Monica Bellucci, in the role of a brutally grown-up young woman. In addition to Lea Massari, Alida Valli, another legend of Italian film, also appears in an episodic role. Dario Di Palma's cinematography brings to life the image of a coastal Italy very different from that of tourist postcards. Some frames are anthological, such as that of the sea and the sky captured in the same grey colour and separated only by a restless horizon line. Mario Nascimbene's soundtrack uses copiously jazz music with saxophone and trumpet solos. There are many good reasons to see 'La prima notte di quiete' and just as many reasons to regret that this film remained just a building block of an unfinished edifice.
Nuanced,heart touching drama
SK_IMDb2123 March 2022
Warning: Spoilers
Such fantastic drama. Loved watching the 60's/70's Italy and its people. Amazing to see the tide of that time, both in the story and the movie making. And that impossible love between the protagonists! What a wonderful, complivated story with so many intertwined and decaying loves. The end was so tragic. What showdown of a scene when revelations are being made. The rawness and humanness. And though superficially on a romance between the leads, it was ultimately about a man in love with his wife. Great cinematography, lovely score, restrained and accomplished acting by Mr. Delon.
Though it drags by today's standards and gets bland at some places, has the most frustrating English subtitles,the movie was classic pieve of cinema.
Though it drags by today's standards and gets bland at some places, has the most frustrating English subtitles,the movie was classic pieve of cinema.
Avoid at all costs
pollux_pt25 August 2021
As someone unfortunate to have sit through the two and a half hours of the original version, I cannot advise this movie to anyone.
The plot suffers from bad slow placing, the story goes nowhere, and there is so much so messed up that made all my friends uncomfortable as they watched the movie. The cast is okay, but the writing is a solid turd.
You have better out there.
The plot suffers from bad slow placing, the story goes nowhere, and there is so much so messed up that made all my friends uncomfortable as they watched the movie. The cast is okay, but the writing is a solid turd.
You have better out there.
Predictable from the start
phuckracistgop4 March 2024
Weak plot, extra weak script and you could see what was next on the agenda from miles away.
The teacher walked around like a PI with his overcoat lapel up even while indoors. Too weak and totally outlandish and straight out the gate the script had him focused on the one girl.
It seems that these producers will find any bit of written garbage if it allows them to have young women get naked for the weakest of reasons.
Even when there is zero chemistry between the two actors. The only bright spot in this softcore porn is that the teacher dies and not soon enough.
I gave it 8 stars, subtracted 6 stars for the predictability of the movie and added 1 star for the death of the POS teacher.
The teacher walked around like a PI with his overcoat lapel up even while indoors. Too weak and totally outlandish and straight out the gate the script had him focused on the one girl.
It seems that these producers will find any bit of written garbage if it allows them to have young women get naked for the weakest of reasons.
Even when there is zero chemistry between the two actors. The only bright spot in this softcore porn is that the teacher dies and not soon enough.
I gave it 8 stars, subtracted 6 stars for the predictability of the movie and added 1 star for the death of the POS teacher.
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