Indian Summer

As someone unfortunate to have sit through the two and a half hours of the original version, I cannot advise this movie to anyone.

The plot suffers from bad slow placing, the story goes nowhere, and there is so much so messed up that made all my friends uncomfortable as they watched the movie. The cast is okay, but the writing is a solid turd.

You have better out there.

This is forgotten Italian master Valerio Zurlini's third best film after "Family Diary" and "Le Soldattese." It features one of Alain Delon's very best performances and an equally good supporting one from Giancarlo Giannini. Delon plays a hard-drinking and gambling professor of poetry who is fascinated by the sullenness of a beautiful student(Sonia Petrovna) and gradually falls in love with her. He finds out through his gambling buddies that she is involved in a pornography-prostitution operation of some kind. Zurlini's great film uses a slightly over-the-top melodramatic style to delve deep into the existentialist despair of Delon's character as he hangs around the discos of a very liberal and swinging early '70s post-sexual-revolution Italy, depressed by all the empty people around him desperately trying to distract themselves any way they can. The underlying Antonioni-like theme of people trying to distract themselves and merge into a crowd rather than individuate and painfully grow is very similar to that of "Desert of the Tartars," a film that couldn't be more different than "The Professor" on the surface. Dario Di Palma's deep-focus color cinematography in this film is one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous displays of virtuosity this side of Carlo Di Palma's soft-focus work in Antonioni's "Red Desert."

I was forced to settle for an unbelievably awful home brew English subtitle pirated copy so my take away is more of an emotional impression than a deep understanding. Apparently Delon hated working with this director and it didn't click enough with audiences to ever get a proper international dvd release. Boo! That being said, the solemn, hopeless beauty of the outsider leads and their star crossed romance screams of untold potential. I just wish I had a better idea of what was going on than just an outline of depressed, lonely teacher + disillusioned young student + gambling problem + Italian mafia = tragedy. Seriously, the only available English subtitling is so bad that it was like reading the cliff notes of a mad man who is incapable of complete sentences.

Weak plot, extra weak script and you could see what was next on the agenda from miles away.

The teacher walked around like a PI with his overcoat lapel up even while indoors. Too weak and totally outlandish and straight out the gate the script had him focused on the one girl.

It seems that these producers will find any bit of written garbage if it allows them to have young women get naked for the weakest of reasons.

Even when there is zero chemistry between the two actors. The only bright spot in this softcore porn is that the teacher dies and not soon enough.

I gave it 8 stars, subtracted 6 stars for the predictability of the movie and added 1 star for the death of the POS teacher.

I'm starting to gain more appreciation for Alain Delon after seeing some more of his 1970s work, because he's an actor who proved himself willing to take on more challenging and unexpected roles as he got a little older. I don't think age affected his looks too much (he's almost 40 here, and kind of made to look a little rough/disheveled, but is still typically dashing), but his roles earlier did sometimes feel a bit heart-throbby, admittedly still broken up by films like Le Samourai.

He's really good in Indian Summer, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. It's slow but effectively melancholic; not a fun film, but it works well as a character study.