Bezenby After a demented credit sequence, things calm down a bit by presenting Franco Nero in his pants, tied to a chair, while Vanessa Redgrave surrounds him with electric gadgets, including an underwater television which she places between his legs. Vanessa then murders Franco in the shower. It's a typical artist's day.And a dream, thankfully. Franco is having trouble completing any picture these days, and Vanessa, as his wife/manager, is getting rather frustrated that he sits around reading porn and being crazy rather than doing anything else. Worse still, he becomes obsessed with a house he spies in the country (in this film, that means that Franco appears and BECKONS HIMSELF into the house, yep, it's one of 'those' films). Franco loves the house but is rather creeped out by certain rooms near the top, and tells Vanessa that 'there's a ghost in my house' and ghost that wants to kill Vanessa, judging by the things pulling her through the floor and trying to fry her while she's having a shower. This might be the spirit of Wanda, a girl with the fanny of a burst couch judging by the stories the locals tell about her.I'm describing this like it's a straightforward 'vengeful ghost' film, but that's far from the truth as the first twenty minutes involving Franco's daily routine are utterly brain melting, and serves to make you doubt anything you see for the entire duration of the film. Is there actually a ghost at all? Is there a conspiracy against Franco or is he just mental? To top it all, there's about three different unreliable narrators in this film too.And on top of that there's the insane direction and the bizarre Morricone soundtrack. We often see things happen about three times in a row from various angles, like Franco appearing to garrotte his wife, but then not doing that at all, or Franco watching himself painting, or frequently imagining himself as Wanda or one of her lovers, or even a guy that gets murdered. Totally off the wall. Morricone's soundtrack is equally mental, going from AMM style improve to tuneless Resident's piano with slide whistle!This is a stand out film for me. Not a classic, but a good one due to the off-beat direction and the usual solid Nero performance. Aye.

Darkling_Zeist The canny on-screen pairing of Vanessa Redgrave & Franco 'Django' Nero generates some considerable frisson in this taut, atmospheric Italian chiller. This enigmatic, surreal giallo is an unwarranted sleeper since 'a quiet pace in the country' (1969) is a skillfully wrought, eerie treatise on madness; with robust performances from the two attractive leads, assured direction by, Elio Petri and a marvellously evocative and uneasy score from, Ennio Morricone, ensures that this Giallo-Gothic is time well spent. 'A Quiet Place in The Country' sits happily alongside 'Repulsion' & 'The house with laughing windows' in terms of mood, style and uneasy content. (special mention has to be made of the wonderfully Godardian, pop-art title sequence, given considerable pep via Morricone's avaunt-beatnik grooves)

lazarillo A talented, imaginative painter(Franco Nero)is having trouble finishing any of his paintings (painter's block?). His matron and lover (Vanessa Redgrave) arranges for him to stay at a quiet villa out in the country. Instead of getting any work done there, however, he becomes obsessed with the story of a beautiful and promiscuous 17-year-old girl who was mysteriously killed at the villa during WWII. The older locals (especially the men)are equally obsessed with the girl,and they all end up holding a bizarre séance. But it is only the painter who starts seeing her ghost and eventually solves the mystery. Or does he? This movie is kind of a combination of a ghost story like "The Sixth Sense" and an artist-as-unreliable-narrator movie like the recent French film "Swimming Pool". It's not really clear whether the ghost exists or whether Nero's character is going crazy (although the latter seems more likely). It is difficult to really compare this movie to a Hollywood-style movie, however. Whereas a Hollywood-style movie would have ratcheted up the suspense and eventually resolved the mystery. This movie starts and ends with pure over-the-top 60's pop psychedelia and only the middle seems to be a really coherent narrative. And this is really more like the more famous 60's Italian film "Blow Up" in that the mystery eventually becomes almost completely irrelevant.The "Blow Up" comparison is tempting in that both films star Vanessa Redgrave in one of her more sex kitten-ish roles as opposed to one of her later, more serious roles (she did both, kind of like a British Jane Fonda). However,this film has a much more frenetic pacing than "Blow Up" and is really of a piece with talented director Elio Petri's other films like "The Tenth Victim" and "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion". Besides, this is much more Franco Nero's show than Redgrave's. This is an unusual role for Nero. He looks physically different--thinner and with much less muscle tone (especially compared to his earlier appearances in "Django" and "Texas Addio"). His character is very manic and seems half-crazed from the outset, and he has a lot of blackly humorous scenes like when he visits the dead girl's lonely, invalid old mother and just kind of helps himself to all her photographs. The supporting cast is good too including the very pretty Gabrielle Grimaldi as the "ghost" and Rita Calderoni (who later worked a lot with equally crazed if less talented Italian directors Renato Poselli and Paolo Solvay) as the maid at the villa, who always seems to be in bed with her "brother" and at one point gets painted-- literally--by her crazed employer. You may or not like this, but you certainly can't say it isn't interesting.

Cinebug A mad artist can't separate fantasy from reality and takes us on a 106 minute, sleep-inducing journey through his own illusions, which include a vision of a girl who died twenty years ago in an Italian villa. Cinematic chloroform from what should have been a fascinating film. Had the music not been so frightfully avant-garde, I might have enjoyed this a little more. I got the point that the music reflected his inner turmoil, but it was just a bit too noisy and chaotic for me. Also, his imitation of a three year old who can't keep the same train of though for more than five minutes de-railed my interest in the story. Vanessa Redgrave, especially, and the rest of the cast give fine performances, but the movie just didn't work for me. This film was a real disappointment and I kept thinking what Mario Bava could have done with material like this!