The Bind That Ties

La Visita. Pina (Sandra Milo) is a small-town spinster with hair like yesterday's escarole and a bottom the size of a hope chest. Adolfo (Francois Perier) is a big-city bachelor with a discouraged mustache and legs like fuzzy yellow pencils. They meet after he answers her ad in a lonely-hearts column, and in this sad, hilarious, faultless little film by Italy's Antonio Pietrangeli, they begin and end in a single day the least hopeful attempt at pairing since the dish ran away with the spoon.

Pina greets her visitor at the railroad station, and they exchange names in embarrassed mumbles. Back home, Pina shyly displays a tacky, bricabracky cottage and the inevitable pets: a dopey turtle that scrapes tediously around the living room, a hoarse parrot that mindlessly advises visitors to "take a blue crayon and color the sky." Then she lays a few cards on the table: she works in a feed store, owns her house outright, has 200,000 lire in the bank. Adolfo follows suit: he works in a bookstore and is dead broke.

Along with his cards, Adolfo unconsciously reveals his character, and it is not a pretty sight. He is a scared little man who compensates his fear with dreary little vices. As he gets the financial picture, his watery eyes gleam with greed, and he assumes a proprietary air. When Pina leaves the room, he arrogantly rearranges some furniture, carelessly cracks a glass lampshade, slyly turns the crack to the wall.

After a few stiff drinks, he kicks the turtle and punches the parrot for pure cussedness--like a bad boy just begging for a beating. When he doesn't get one, he gives the old girl a lusty whack on what follows her around. Poor Pina, delighted to have a man around the house, mistakes insult for interest. But after Adolfo gratuitously sneers at her friends ("I'm a cut above the lot of you") and falls down drunk in her backyard, Pina's patience runs out, and she tells him what a useless mess he is.

Adolfo admits she is right and confesses the fear and loneliness and self-disgust that drive him to do such things. Suddenly their hearts are open, and their plain faces shine with the light of life. They kiss, they make love. But the moment passes and the mess remains. In the morning Adolfo heads for home. "Thank you," he says in numb conclusion, "for a very nice day."

Written, directed and performed with taste, La Visita has something deep to say about the walls people build around themselves and the pain that lives inside. In the simple story of Pina and Adolfo can be traced the complex process that transforms the tie that binds into the bind that ties and causes all the other-hood of man.

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