Dying Light

By J.C.

CONVERSATION PIECE

Directed by LUCHINO VISCONTI Screenplay by SUSO CECCHI D'AMICO, ENRICO MEDIOLO and LUCHINO VISCONTI

"I'm an old man, neurotic and slightly hysterical." It seems a most unlikely confession for Burt Lancaster to be making, but then there is nothing likely at all about Conversation Piece, Luchino Visconti's latest movie. Hearing Lancaster speak those lines early in the film and watching later as he ostensibly grows sick and faces death, there is the inescapable sense that the actor is speaking for, even standing in for, the film maker himself.

Now nearly 70, Visconti has been seriously ill for several years. Conversation Piece, made entirely in a studio, as if to spare the director the rigors of working on location, is about losing touch with life.

Squabbles and Pairings. Lancaster appears as a wealthy, unworldly man of taste and learning whose upstairs apartments in Rome are invaded by a family of rich sybarites. The Professor, as he is respectfully called, has no intention of renting the unused space in the first place, but is bullied, bribed and bluffed into the arrangement by an arrogant countess (Silvana Mangano), her daughter (Claudia Marsani) and the daughter's boy friend (Stefano Patrizi).

It seems that the countess is especially eager to use the apartments for a handy place to stash her ambisexual boy friend Konrad (Helmut Berger).

Soon the Professor, who wants little more than the time to study his books and pore over his art collection, becomes embroiled in the sexual squabbles and pairings going on right above his head.

He is shocked and angry initially, then gradually enthralled. It is here that Conversation Piece starts to go wildly wrong.

For its first half-hour or so, the movie is funny, coruscating--almost like pratfall Pinter, as the brash family gradually overwhelms the Professor.

Then Visconti assumes a more somber tone. Konrad turns out to be a person of radical political persuasion. Helmut Berger is a conspicuously unreliable man to get close to in a locker room, much less in a demonstration; he is nevertheless required to convince us that he "threw himself into the student movement." This background, which is about as likely as Jean Cocteau in his youth going three rounds in the Golden Gloves eliminations, rather diminishes the credibility of Visconti's entire enterprise.

More seriously, Visconti forsakes the wit of the opening for a kind of tongue-tied general valedictory. He is interested not so much in exposing his characters as having the Professor embrace all of them, opening his arms to their indulgences and sanctioning their moral impotence. "You could be my family," the Professor tells them all almost longingly, weighing his cloistered life against their wasted ones and finding that his own is wanting. For both Visconti and his protagonist, it is the conclusion of a numb and desperate man.

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