A Leap in the Dark

A Leap in the Dark
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Produced by Anna Maria Clementelli
Silvio Clementelli
Written by Marco Bellocchio
Piero Natoli
Vincenzo Cerami
Starring Michel Piccoli
Anouk Aimée
Music by Nicola Piovani
Cinematography Giuseppe Lanci
Edited by Brigitte Sousselier
Release dates
  • 14 February 1980 (1980-02-14)
Running time
 120 minutes
Country Italy
Language Italian

A Leap in the Dark (Italian: Salto nel vuoto, and also known as Leap Into the Void) is a 1980 Italian film written and directed by Marco Bellocchio. It stars Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimée, who won the Best Actor and Best Actress prizes respectively at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.[1] The film also won the David di Donatello for Best Director and was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 53rd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.[2]

Plot

Judge Mauro Ponticelli has been raised by his older sister Marta. However, Marta has been having mental problems and fantasizing about committing suicide, which concerns him greatly. She seems to recover when he introduces her to Giovanni Sciabola, a brilliant actor, but Mauro then finds himself becoming jealous of their relationship.

Cast

Criticism

The film was favourably reviewed by the eminent critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker : " The protagonist of Leap - a judge, Mauro Ponticelli, played by the usually suave French actor Michel Piccoli - is mean in perverse, Bunuelian ways...Mauro has always been protected and cared for by his older sister, Marta..He has no intention of growing up...[her] unusual behaviour has actually been a sign that she is rebelling - that she's struggling to free herself from her deathly bondage to him... The movie is about family entanglements and the functions of madness...Mauro is a craven fraud...Mauro the judge is a worm : a spoiled worm wriggling in its comfortable nest...Piccoli is able to give this mesmerizing performance despite the fact that he and Anouk Aimée are dubbed into Italian...Anouk Aimée is usually strikingly beautiful and a little blank - not quite in contact;.. But she's a magnificent camera subject, and her remoteness fits the situation here..Leap Into the Void is a film about people who are out of control made by a director who's in as close to total control as a moviemaker is ever likely to be..there's greatness in it." [3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: A Leap in the Dark". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
  2. ↑ Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  3. ↑ Pauline Kael reprinted in Taking It All In p 418-421

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/5/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.