Gli Occhi Degli Altri

At the opening, the customary disclaimer appears: “any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.” A gesture of preventive self-absolution, a necessary precaution.

Yet, though inspired by a famous crime — the Casati Stampa murder — and set in the 1960s, the film seems to betray itself, delivering a drama centered on desire, power, the gaze, and betrayal, only to slide into an unintentional comedy, composed of interminable opening sequences — thirty-nine minutes of sex and half-light — and settings so implausible they provoke laughter instead of engagement.

The very title, Gli occhi degli altri (The Eyes of Others), makes lofty promises: the gaze as an instrument of power, the Other who watches and is watched, transgression turned obsession. The official synopsis speaks of sex and power on an island owned by a marquis — a potentially “Gothic” frame for a sentimental drama.

But it is as if a fissure has opened in the marquis’s palace: everything overflows, blurs, contaminates. The boundaries between desire and pantomime dissolve into the languor of a dying empire, where the count — between a glass of champagne and a video recording — seems more interested in his voyeurism than in the relationship itself. A late-bourgeois echo of old-time bungabunga excesses, disguised as torment.

The impression is that the film begins more like a music video for a festival of desire than as a dramatic investigation. Sex, which could have been a tool of tension or rupture, becomes here a mere exercise in style and posing, devoid of gravity. In a good drama, the sexual transaction carries consequences, horror, remorse. Here, instead, the real drama seems to be waiting around the corner, while we remain spectators to visual performances and erotic interludes that would have found a better place in another film. The result? The audience ends up laughing, detached and uninvolved.

The film pretends to probe desire, jealousy, and destruction — but does so from a false stage. Amid this artificial theatricality, a letter appears: the countess’s severance and her formal divorce from the count, now drowned in his own identity shipwreck. A scene meant to be tragic but that turns out merely tragicomic. The viewing experience alternates between embarrassment, bewilderment, and boredom.
 The countess, a few years after their Venetian wedding, had slipped into an elegant depression, a boudoir melancholy; then, to recover, she turned to a young, handsome but poor lover, with a home no larger than their bedroom.

The epilogue, which sees her liberated and the count dissolved in his sentimental exile, seems to seal the end of an era: not the tragedy of desire, but the parody of its memory. Parlors reeking of hypocrisy, mannered gestures, gilded beds where nothing happens except the staging of decadence.

Perhaps the true drama lies not in the crime, nor in love, nor in the protagonists’ madness, but in the condition of a certain kind of Italian cinema that still believes it can sublimate emptiness through half-light. Indolence is mistaken for depth, aesthetics for metaphysics, sex for eroticism. Every shot seems to apologize for existing; every line of dialogue fears being taken seriously. It is the new aristocratic vice: a poverty of ideas masked as poetic ambiguity — the same illusion that leads directors to believe silence equals truth. In reality, it is only the sound of the void, perfectly photographed.