The subtle, probing camera of director Zurlini (with its admirable choice of camera angles and remarkably fluid camera movement), allied with the evocative, deceptively simple yet superbly skilled photography of Santoni, clothe this wistful and heart-tuggingly scored romantic drama with an appeal that is as immediate as the pretty pout of Claudia Cardinale's lips, and as attractive as the sun-shrouded locations of Parma and Riccione. Acting is fine throughout, and Claudia Cardinale's admirers need not be too upset by the English-dubbed version, as she doesn't speak her own lines in the Italian version either. The original running time is listed as 135 minutes, but I've never met anyone who has actually seen this version. IMDb lists 121 minutes, but the dubbed version I saw at a studio preview ran 115 minutes (which is still longer than the U.S. sub-titled version of around 110 minutes or the U.K. dubbed version of 96 minutes).

There are moments in this film when you feel your feet lift of the ground and you enter a pure state of movie nirvana. Only the Italians could bring together style, elegance, poise, wit, sensitivity and irony like this, and play it out in the real world with real characters. The amour fou seems original: the sensitive ingenue is nobility (Jacques Perrin), while the girl (Claudia Cardinale) - his older brother's cast-off - is an impoverished drifter. It's not so much the obvious contrast in their backgrounds that provides the tension so much as the directions their yearnings take, that flash across each others' paths like ungainly swordsmanship. The fresh faces of the leads are a delight. It's really the quiet dignity of Perrin that carries the film while Cardinale is the sudden whirlwind that blows into his life. Technique is employed to brilliant effect: the waist-level camera, Zurlini's signature artistic shadows on the walls, and, most tellingly, the way distant characters gradually draw close to our position, a trick established with the first shot of the film. There's no finer kind of cinema.

Zurlini introduces a familiar theme, a futile relationship with an older woman and a younger man, perfected in his later film `Violent Summer,' but here Aida, Claudia Cardinale, plays a nighclub singer who is jilted in the opening moments of the film and spends the rest of the film searching for a way out of the stereotypical relationship of a beautiful woman using, and being used by men, a dependent and unhealthy relationship. When Marcello, a cad who lives in a lavish estate, tells his 16 year old younger Lorenzo, Jacques Perrin, to get rid of the girl, the younger brother's interest turns from bewilderment to unbridled obsession, as the high-strung, free-spirited girl surprisingly is flattered by his attention and by her belief that he has money, contrasting the obvious class distinction between the two, he lives in a statue-filled estate with his family, she lives alone out of a suitcase in a hotel room. The adults in the film are overly stern and heartless, represented by the familiar Zurlini statues which can be seen throughout his entire body of work; this lifelessness is contrasted against the passion of youth. The relationship comes to a screeching halt with the intervention of the family priest who questions Aida's motives with such a young and impressionable boy, urging her to move on. This is a brilliant scene where they speak in what appears to be a museum construction area, broken statues lie about with other scattered debris as the priest tries to reconstruct the spiritual direction of the young lovers, urging them to go their separate ways. This leads Aida into the arms of another conniving man who attempts to seduce her with plenty of money and alcohol, but Lorenzo arrives, refuses to butt out, gets his butt kicked by the older man, which leads to this extraordinarily long, beautifully evolving scene on the beach where the two lovers are caught up in the mysteries of their own futility, a kind of existential despair, surrounded by the wonderment of nature. This film constantly shifts the focus on who is the victim and who is to blame, in the end there are no answers, just a continuous search.

This somewhat mediocre and meandering melodramatic film by Zurlini features Claudia Cardinale at her most exquisitely beautiful in every shot and what shots! Beautiful long takes that allow you to concentrate on whatever you want. Tino Santoni is a hell of cinematographer, whoever he was, a total master. If the script had been a little bit better the film might've ended up transcending into a superpoetic realm like Zurlini's awesome technicolor 1962 film "Family Diary"; as it is, it's very much a failure in an overall sense but still pretty good as probably the ultimate ode to one of the most beautiful actresses in cinematic history.