Even major film buffs might struggle to identify a link
between, among others, Dario Argento, Paul Morrissey, Billy Wilder, Marco
Bellocchio and Elio Petri, but one exists in the form of cinematographer Luigi
Kuveiller, whose work on Wilder’s Avanti! came in between assignments
for those latter two. No doubt Avanti! isn’t the maestro’s most distinctive
work, any more than it’s anyone else’s, but he aptly maintains the requisite sun-baked
palate, while navigating such novel framing challenges as a naked Jack Lemmon
emerging from the sea or the bathtub. That might not sound like a recommendation,
but it’s a film of sustained small pleasures, one in which Wilder elevates even
the most potentially mundane scene with a well-delivered quip or bit of
business (many of them handled by Clive Revill, in career-best form as a
pragmatically unflusterable Italian hotel manager). Absent that, the overall
trajectory isn’t too surprising: short-fused businessman Wendell (Lemmon, who
else, mannerisms held mostly in check) comes to Italy at short notice to recover
his father’s body, learning that during his annual health breaks the old man
was carrying out a ten-year affair with a British woman whose daughter Pamela (a
very winning Juliet Mills) is there for the same reason, the two having died in
a car accident together; Wendell and Pamela initially clash, but by the end,
well… The film’s sense of cyclicality and inevitability makes it well-suited
for comfort viewing-type revisiting (albeit maybe not annually), despite many
programmatic aspects, and dated trappings such as endless remarks about Pamela’s
barely discernible weight problem (especially given a now-laughable comment
about how Americans are all so thin), although a diplomat’s brief summary of
the state of the Middle East still holds up sadly well. In terms of Wilder’s
late work, the film is a close companion to Fedora, an artifice even
more dislodged from time, in which pleasure is even more intimately informed by
loss.
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