{"id":12560,"date":"2015-11-07T12:53:06","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T17:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=12560"},"modified":"2015-11-07T13:14:30","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T18:14:30","slug":"dvd-wild-blood-sanguepazzo-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=12560","title":{"rendered":"DVD: Wild Blood \/ Sanguepazzo (2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\"WildBlood_2008\"<\/a>Film<\/strong>: Good<\/p>\n

Transfer<\/strong>: \u00a0Very Good<\/p>\n

Extras<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0n\/a<\/p>\n

Label:\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0eOne Films<\/p>\n

Region:<\/strong>\u00a01 (NTSC)<\/p>\n

Released:<\/strong>\u00a0 April 27, 2010<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong>\u00a0 Drama \/ Romance \/ War<\/p>\n

Synopsis:<\/strong>\u00a0The tragic final years of Italy’s silver screen couple Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida are dramatized in a fractured structure, leading up to their execution during the final days of WWII.<\/p>\n

Special Features:<\/strong>\u00a0 (none)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Review:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In April of 1945, two of Italy\u2019s most popular actors were arrested by anti-Fascist partisans, reportedly hurried through a quick sentencing and taken into the street, where Osvaldo Valenti<\/a> and his pregnant lover Luisa Ferida<\/a> were executed by gunfire \u2013 a brutal event that undoubtedly horrified the pair\u2019s fans, and left a dark footnote in the history of Italian film.<\/p>\n

In spite of the film’s high pedigree \u00a0–\u00a0Sangepazzo<\/strong> \/ aka\u00a0Wild Blood<\/strong>\u00a0stars Luca Zingaretti (Il commissario Montalbano<\/strong>) as Valenti, Monica Bellucci (Spectre<\/strong>, Brotherhood of the Wolf<\/a><\/strong>) as Ferida, and features Best of Youth<\/strong>\u00a0director Marco Tullio Giordana\u00a0\u2013 it becomes clear within the first third that Wild Blood <\/strong>is a very mediocre bio-drama that injects more fiction than fact to transform an already compelling moment in Italian film into outright melodrama.<\/p>\n

Giordana\u2019s film is also much too long, suffering from a clumsy flashback structure which bounces between post-assassination scenes to fragments of the couple\u2019s burgeoning relationship as Valenti, already a huge star, began to court up-and-coming starlet Ferida. By the time the pair were industry news items, they\u2019d begun to appear in films together, and worked with some of the country\u2019s top directors.<\/p>\n

Giordana\u2019s script flows through specific periods which cover the industry\u2019s relocation from Rome\u2019s Cinecitta to Venice, and Valenti\u2019s own peculiar career trajectory, as he shifted from movie star to a position in the military.<\/p>\n

According to the film, as a lieutenant he routed out partisans and fraternized with some of the regime\u2019s most brutal figures, including Pietro Koch<\/a> (terrifying Paolo Bonanni), but either due to a scarcity of details and first-hand accounts or a need to enhance the tragedy of Valenti and Ferida\u2019s demise, Giordana also created the fictional character of Golfiero Goffredi (Alessio Boni), a left-leaning, kind of gay director-producer who becomes an industry outcast and joins the partisan movement.<\/p>\n

Reportedly inspired by Luchino Visconti\u2019s wartime involvement, Goffredi\u2019s position as a moderate partisan allows Giordana to needle drop the character into the narrative whenever the star couple are in a quandary, rescuing them from gunfire, and later pleading for a fair trial instead of outright sentencing and execution. Goffredi\u2019s also quietly in love with Ferida \u2013 an impossible situation in the film, given her devotion to Osvaldo, and an impossible situation for audiences when it\u2019s clear Goffredi never existed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The creation of a singular fake character designed to function as some history marker to allow audiences to track dramatic events ultimately robs the central true-life characters of their charisma and depth, lessening their impact on audiences, and reducing what should\u2019ve been a woeful tale of bad choices and wartime insanity into slow-burning melodrama.<\/p>\n

Bellucci is beautiful but always grave, rarely smiling and providing little insight into Ferida\u2019s own charisma which impressed movie audiences of the era. Zingaretti\u2019s version of Valenti is broad and fiery, and it\u2019s a characterization that substitutes emotional volatility (a trait enhanced by Valenti’s heroine and cocaine addictions) when there\u2019s little personal details or reasoning as to why a top star would involve himself in ground-level policing.\u00a0The implication is Valenti was an opportunist akin to German Third Reich stars \u2013 enjoying a career under the protective cover of a self-professed eternal and powerful regime and its propaganda machinery.<\/p>\n

Ferida occasionally mutters statements that attempt to characterize Valenti\u2019s fascistic slide and associations as partly ego-driven, as a means to access drugs, and \u2018playing\u2019 a lieutenant as a character within a warped, long-form historical drama with an unwritten finale, but none of it satisfies our curiosity.<\/p>\n

Positives include gorgeous production design, striking locations, lush cinematography by Roberto Forza, and a sparse score by Franco Piersanti, but\u00a0<\/span>Wild Blood<\/strong>\u00a0only clicks when the disturbing aspects of Valenti\u2019s life are presented in banal circumstances, such as movie-loving Koch giving Valenti a tour of his dungeon after a jovial dinner, and the feted actor confronting human misery in person rather than on a sanitized film set.<\/span><\/p>\n

For all the criticism flung at Wild Blood<\/strong>, it\u2019s a more than functional melodrama, but Giordana\u2019s decision to cinematize reality and create historic junctures using jarring flashbacks makes the experience a bit ponderous. In addition to learning very little of the star couple, it\u2019s also disappointing few of their films exist as Region 1 DVDs, as Valenti was a talented actor who appeared in several important films. His version of former servant-turned-vengeful manipulator in Alessando Blasetti\u2019s The Jester\u2019s Supper<\/strong><\/a> (1942) is outstanding, and it\u2019s his performance that makes the film an iron-clad classic.<\/p>\n

Films in which Valenti and Ferrida co-starred include Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa<\/strong> (1939), La corona di ferro <\/strong>(1941), Fedora<\/strong> (1942), I cavalieri del deserto<\/strong> (1942), La bella addormentata<\/strong> (1942), La cena delle beffe <\/strong>(1942), Orizzonte di sangue <\/strong>(1942), Harlem<\/strong> (1943), La locandiera<\/strong> (1944), and Fatto di cronaca<\/strong> (1945).<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

External References:<\/strong>
\nEditor’s Blog<\/a> — IMDB<\/a> \u00a0— \u00a0Soundtrack Album<\/a> —\u00a0Composer Filmography<\/a>
\n\u00a0<\/span>
\nVendor Search Links:<\/strong>
\nAmazon.ca<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.com<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In April of 1945, two of Italy\u2019s most popular actors were arrested by anti-Fascist partisans, reportedly hurried through a quick sentencing, and taken into the street where Osvaldo Valenti and his pregnant lover Luisa Ferida were executed by gunfire \u2013 a brutal event that undoubtedly horrified the pair\u2019s fans, and left a dark footnote in the history of Italian film…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[4068,4066,4069,4067,4065,4063,4064],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-3gA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12560"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12593,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12560\/revisions\/12593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}