Specters of Neurosis

By JAY COCKS

Elio Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country is a fine, unsettling ghost movie. But the spooks in this story are made of neuroses, not ectoplasm, and they haunt the mind, not the attic. Petri is crafty enough not to explain his spirits away, but clever enough at the same time to provide a rational explanation of all the freaky goings on.

His story concentrates on the mental disintegration of an Italian pop artist (Franco Nero). Tortured by paranoiac and frequently brutal sexual fantasies, the artist persuades his patron and mistress (Vanessa Redgrave) to rent him a long-deserted villa outside Milan--"a quiet place in the country." The villa turns out to have been the trysting place of a nymphomaniacal adolescent countess who was killed during the second World War. While his mistress stays m town, the artist settles down in the villa, only to become haunted, then possessed by the phantom presence of the dead girl.

Nightmare blurs reality at first, then smothers it. Episodes of the girl's sexual history fit snugly into the artist's own fantasies. Soon his only desire is to be alone with the specter. Whenever his mistress comes to visit, the house seems to turn against her: floors cave in under her feet, gas heaters explode in her face. Watching her survive this succession of narrow escapes, the artist resolves to finish her off himself as a kind of blood offering to the spirit.

As interested in sensations as psychology, Director Petri forgoes the subtleties of a typical Jamesian ghost story to concentrate on visceral effects. The movie has many kinky and splendidly horrifying moments, including a sadistic nightmare, a daylight visitation in a garden, and a tumultuous seance sequence Franco Nero, in a difficult part, manages to convey just the right amount of obsessive menace;, while the excellent Vanessa Redgrave, in a simpler one lends to the proceedings a saving edge of meticulously rendered reality.

Petri is a sardonic stylist whose freewheeling camera can perform some incredible acrobatics. In A Quiet Place, it weaves around, goes quickly in and out of focus, moves jarringly from one object to another, all to evoke a sense of edgy anxiety.

Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.