A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)

Elio Petri’s extraordinary psychosexual thriller A Quiet Place in the Country is usually discussed in terms of the Italian giallo because it’s a notable precursor of the genre. But it’s not quite that straightforward. It’s an experimental art movie that is, itself, about art… I might add “among other things” but in this context, art encompasses all its entangled socio-political themes of creativity, consumerism, perception, sexuality, sanity, and identity. It’s an intriguing treatise on the similarities that bridge madness and creativity. There’s a lot to unpack here, so it’s great news that Radiance is releasing an uncut high-definition digital transfer on Blu-ray, presenting the perfect format to repeatedly revisit this complex, visually adventurous minor classic.

Ostensibly, the elusive plot concerns an avant-garde artist suffering a debilitating creative block that exacerbates his descent into madness when he investigates the mysterious death of a young woman. Or does it? In a freewheeling visual feast, Elio Petri offers us a multifaceted narrative with several different potential readings, some of which are conflicting.

The themes are already presaged by a title sequence of impeccably selected images from art history, including a fragmented cubist body by Pablo Picasso, a lesser-known tree painting by Piet Mondrian, elongated figures by Alberto Giacometti, political paintings of executions by Francisco Goya, Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, one of Francis Bacon’s Pope paintings, and the orgiastic Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix. One could write an entire essay on the meanings linking these assorted works with the story about to unfold, but basically, they all relate to existential angst. René Magritte’s 1951 painting, titled Perspective: Madame Récamier by David, of a coffin bent into the shape of a reclining body, is later recreated as a set for one of the film’s key moments.

Following the titles, the opening scene introduces artist Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) stripped down to a loin cloth and securely bound to a chair as his lover, Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave), demonstrates various electrical appliances, including a motorised knife sharpener. After setting up a video camera and placing the monitor between his feet, she taunts him with the knife and bites his flesh. She then activates a shoe-shine machine that buffs his feet and shins before leaving him to free himself from the ropes in frustration.

He retires to the bathroom where, in a gender-reversal of the classic shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), he’s attacked and repeatedly stabbed by Flavia as she fluctuates between nude and clothed. However, this is neither a continuity error nor the opening gambit of a giallo but simply a disturbed dream sequence. We are left unsure when reality transitioned into the nightmare or whether all we’ve seen so far only played out in Leonardo’s subconscious. This sets the precedent for blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined in a story recounted through the experiences of an unreliable narrator.

We then learn that Leonardo is a ‘kept man’ when he asks for spending money from Flavia before she leaves him to his work. The symbolism of his submissive position during his dream is an early hint that he feels controlled, emasculated, and stifled by the uneven power gradient of their relationship and may be ready to retaliate. For inspiration, he flicks through news images of violent death, torture, disease, deformity, famine—all things that distort or destroy the body—interspersed with pornography—which objectifies and exalts an aesthetic ideal of the female form. He seems so equally appalled and stimulated by this parade of pictures that he finally remains ambivalent, perhaps desensitised. He sets to work, struggling to cover the surfaces of huge canvasses with energetically applied paint, vibrant colours mixing into subdued and darker hues as they smear together. A metaphor of lively feelings blending with indistinct, darker thoughts.

Framed within a fraught personal drama are elements of a ‘whodunnit’ mystery thriller and ‘old dark house’ ghost story. This refreshing though messy genre mash-up is effectively gripping up to a point, but too many aspects stubbornly remain open to interpretation. So, as we are assaulted by increasingly troubling and inexplicable imagery, the audience may well heave a collective sigh of exasperation because this fracturing of reality is difficult to grasp… until the final few scenes. Yet, as the credits roll, there’s still plenty of room for debate.

This prolonged uncertainty is in keeping with the script’s source material, The Beckoning Fair One, a short story by Oliver Onions (yes, his real name), first published in 1911. It tracks the creative crisis of a writer who, seeking peace to concentrate on his work, moves into a flat within an otherwise unoccupied block. There, he begins to see and hear the ghost of a young woman who had lived and died in the house. Whether this is a genuine haunting or a manifestation of psychosis is, for the most part, ambiguous and never fully resolved. Onions is credited with moving Gothic-style terrors from the corridors of crumbling castles and cathedral crypts, rehoming them in our contemporary abodes.

The Beckoning Fair One is the most widely remembered of his many stories and is esteemed as one of the finest examples of supernatural fiction. It’s since inspired many authors to repurpose the central themes for their similar works such as Karl Edward Wagner’s In the Pines which, in turn, part-inspired the haunting song of the same title by Australian band The Triffids. Incidentally, another more faithful interpretation, directed by Don Chaffey for the Hammer-produced television series Journey to the Unknown (1968), was being made in parallel with Petri’s feature.

Perhaps most famously, Stephen King expanded the short story into his 1977 novel The Shining, subsequently filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. As a maverick auteur, Elio Petri has sometimes been called ‘Italy’s Kubrick’ because he is also an unpredictable director of only a dozen or so very different features, unified by themes rather than styles. For me, Petri’s interpretation of Onions’ story is superior to Kubrick’s which over-simplified the narrative, leaning too heavily on structural formalism and outrageous overacting.

Conversely, it could be argued that Petri over-complicated matters! He’s known to have been developing his adaptation as early as 1961 in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, beginning while working together on the script for his debut feature L’assassino (1961). However, as production neared, Guerra’s time was taken up with, among other things, writing Blow-up (1967) with director Michelangelo Antonioni—another psychological thriller starring Vanessa Redgrave. Luciano Vincenzoni, who’d just contributed to A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), completed the screenplay with Petri.

So, perhaps he’d overworked it during those six years. The result is a plot that fits tightly together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, but not necessarily all taken out of the same box. Admittedly, the highly original and disconcerting imagery meshes perfectly with the pared-back dialogue to create a compelling visual experience. However, despite the dynamic camerawork and often frenetic editing, the braided narrative progresses at a rather leisurely pace, allowing it to gradually entangle us.

Petri made the logical decision to change the protagonist into a visual artist rather than an author, which is better suited to the medium of cinema, thus pushing the character’s conflicting intellect and emotions into the visual realm. Expressive art is not solely cerebral but a physical extension of the artist’s body and gestures. To achieve a solid sense of authenticity, the Pop artist Jim Dine was brought in to work with Franco Nero on set. First, the artist would make a painting, and then the actor would mimic his actions and processes for the camera. Dine and Nero produced a dozen or so works each during production.

Petri’s choice of Dine as the model for Leonardo Ferri was prescient as he was a key artist in the development of actions as art. Another of Dine’s themes was the inclusion of process within the art; so the act of making and the tools he used were often part of the finished work. This is best exemplified by his 1962 piece, descriptively titled Five Feet of Colorful Tools, which comprises a large square canvas with the outlines of DIY tools colourfully stencilled on it and the real tools that were used hung in a row along the top of the canvas. This has a resonance with Leonardo Ferri in the movie who feels that his role in the production of his art has been reduced to a mere tool that others are using to produce a commodity that they can then sell. In fact, during his making of one large work, Leonardo indeed uses humans as stencils, spraying them with red paint to leave life-size silhouettes, toying with the idea of tying them to the canvas with rope.

Leonardo clearly has mental problems and suffers from some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He sometimes hears a disembodied voice narrating his actions and he’s plagued by hallucinations. He repeatedly sees himself acting out his desires, whether they be running childlike through a meadow, suffering sexualised violence or perpetrating it upon others. He also has a recurring vision of himself, strapped into a wheelchair and being pushed by Flavia as his nurse. Are these simply hallucinations, repressed memories, prophetic visions, or even reality breaking through his delusions? Whatever they are, they’re always visually interesting. It seems his obsession with pornography and making art has been his diversion to prevent these intrusive thoughts from taking hold, but a seemingly immovable creative block is threatening his ability to control himself.

At least he has insight that his sanity is sliding and pleads with Flavia, “I can’t go on like this. I’m sick. Got to get away from the city.” So, she sets up a residency for him at the country villa of a local count, who is also a primary dealer of his works. However, when he arrives, Leonardo is dismayed at the setup which requires him to work while potential buyers visit to watch his process, and a journalist produces a photo essay about the creative retreat. This only accentuates his feelings of being owned like a pet, of being powerless, under Flavia’s control. So, he makes a break for it and drives to another abandoned villa he has already seen himself in. There, he meets Attilio (Georges Géret) the caretaker who mentions that the property is available to rent, remarking that he would find the peace he seeks because “Only death could be quieter.”

His move to the dilapidated, literally tumble-down, property presents him with a new obsession when he learns of a young woman named Wanda (Gabriella Grimaldi) who died tragically there decades earlier. He begins hearing footsteps and doors opening and closing in the night and it seems that a restless spirit destroys his studio, tossing cans of paint around and slashing his canvasses in an effective abstract sequence where items seem to violently animate themselves.

Leonardo began to glimpse flashes of the young blonde wearing a red dress. Also, a strange man was seen leaving posies of flowers against the wall where it was said she died during a wartime air raid. Wanda seemed to symbolise the refuge of nostalgia when faced with the rapidly changing present and uncertain future. Leonardo was compelled to investigate and find out all he could about the woman, and this became his new all-consuming passion, effectively displacing the last vestiges of artistic inspiration he may have held onto. It seemed she may have been a “free spirit” seducing the young men of the village and setting one against another, reflecting the period she lived in when Mussolini’s fascism did the same thing on a national scale.

At times, one could almost believe Petri was satirising the giallo with such knowing use of its signifiers – the red paint and the red dress presaging bloody death. However, in 1968 the modern Italian giallo had not yet taken its distinctive form. Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) had laid down the ground rules, but Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) had yet to consolidate the genre. A Quiet Place in the Country does, however, echo the superior and more meditative proto-giallo The Possessed (1965) which has so many similarities that instead of being based loosely on a real murder case, one might believe it’s inspired by the same Onions short story—and maybe some aspects were. Both films hint at the supernatural and deal with the obsessions and psychological instability of a man struggling with creative block. Each has a murder mystery embedded at the heart of their enigmatic narratives.

Critics have attempted to align Petri’s experimental approach with the New Wave exemplified by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard. While some of his camerawork, handled by his preferred cinematographer, Luigi Kuveiller for A Quiet Place in the Country may be as innovative, the film sits more comfortably in the lineage of Surrealist cinema. Luis Buñuel’s psychosexual satires, Viridiana (1961) and Belle de jour (1967) spring readily to mind as does Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965)—but the audience will have more fun with Petri.

Marcello Mastroianni was initially cast for the lead but I, for one, am happy that a clash of schedules allowed Franco Nero to step in and deliver what must be one of his finest performances and that alone makes the movie a worthwhile watch. Although his character is defensively arrogant, childishly petulant, and yes, insane, he also allows us to respond to his vulnerability and see those around him as, maybe inadvertently, his exploiters. With her theatrical style Vanessa Redgrave’s cool, calculating Flavia is an excellent foil for his naturalistic, mercurial Leonardo and it’s hard to imagine a better-suited pairing.

Nero and Redgrave had met the year before while filming Camelot (1967) and had a son together the following year, in 1969. After drifting apart during the 1970s they would eventually get together again and finally marry in 2006.

Too convoluted and confusing for a mainstream audience, A Quiet Place in the Country didn’t perform well at the box office. Though it won a Silver Bear at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival and was granted limited international distribution in France and the US, it wasn’t until interest in the Italian giallo rekindled during the first decade of the 21st-century that it resurfaced and was critically reassessed along with other films from Elio Petri. Radiance is releasing his crime thriller We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) alongside this title and has previously released the politically charged drama The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971).

ITALY • FRANCE | 1968 | 106 MINUTES | ‎1.85:1 | COLOUR | ITALIAN • ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• High-definition digital transfer, presented with optional English and Italian audio tracks, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio.
• Select-scene audio commentary looking at Petri’s recurring themes of masculinity by critic and filmmaker Kat Ellinger (2024, 40 mins.) Identifying Petri’s unifying theme as men in existential crisis, there is plenty of astute analysis of the themes and subtexts, placing the production against a contextual backdrop of post-war Italy and how the personal is made political. There is analysis of the visual grammar of the giallo and the psychosexual implications of some mise-en-scène, such as the proliferation of electrical goods representing emasculation in an increasingly consumerist society. All very interesting and enriching, it’s a shame Ellinger wasn’t allowed to continue for the remaining 66 minutes of the feature.
• NEW interview on the film by author Stephen Thrower (2024, 49 mins.) Who does a good job of analysing the portrayals of schizophrenia, the supernatural, suppressed masculine rage, and relationship dynamics before giving an overview of the production? He discusses Elio Petri’s view that art should have a social role to play and be at the service of political change. He compares the film with notable predecessors and shares plenty of information about key cast and crew as well as the filming locations. An excellent complement to the audio commentary.
• Archival interview with actor Franco Nero (2017, 32 mins.) He talks about his breakthrough role in Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) and his casting for A Quiet Place in the Country, which came about via his friend Marcello Mastroianni. He talked of his friendship with Petri and praised the director’s ability to balance experimental rhythm and framing while still delivering the story. He also talked about working with Vanessa Redgrave, whom he had met the year before.
• Interview with make-up artist Pier Antonio Mecacci (2021, 14 mins.) Not yet finalised at the time of review.
• Trailer.
• NEW and improved English subtitle translation for Italian audio and English SDH for English audio.
• Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters.
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by Simon Abrams. Not available at the time of review.
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

Cast & Crew

director: Elio Petri.
writers: Luciano Vincenzoni & Elio Petri (story by Tonino Guerra & Oliver Onions; based on the short story ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ by Oliver Onions)
starring: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Madeleine Damien & Valerio Ruggeri.