So you get some good Italian location footage and some terrific scenes between Omar Sharif and featured actress Lotte Lenya as an antique store owner with fascist leanings from her past. But she's not the lead, and you really get the impression that the relationship between Sharif and Anouk Aimee is not based on love but on possession and the desire to be possessed. She is a high-class model who seems to be involved in prostitution on the side, and he's very suspicious and spends nearly two hours just following her around. When they have serious conversations, there are long pauses between dialogue, and it seems like they're struggling to find anything to say to each other which gives a week impact to the script.
So for nearly two hours, you're waiting for something to really happen, some sort of emotional explosion between the two, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake as this overly quiet film at times becomes painful because of the silence. For a film set in Italy, it certainly lacks passion, and that's one thing you expect from Sharif, one of the sexiest actors of the 1960's. Aimee certainly is gorgeous, but she feels soulless, like she's only go through the motions of loving and is uncapable of really giving even when there is a slight blip of romance between them finally 65 minutes into the film.
So what you don't get from the leads, you hope you'll find with the supporting cast, but outside of Lotte Lenya (fresh from her success on Broadway in "Cabaret"), they all seem artificial and just like walking words that barely jumped off the paper and onto the screen. Even under the direction of Sidney Lumet, this fails to be anything more then on occasional beautiful piece of artwork that you looked at briefly but really can't figure out. Perhaps it's a lesson of karma since Sharif basically stole her from his law partner, and even that story is not fully developed. Still, you can find some visual excitement with the locations particularly a romantic scene in the woods on a broken rowboat and later on a field that seem like they belong in another movie. When the camera in the helicopter filming the scene pulls up thousands of feet above them, it seems like it's time for the conclusion, but there's still another half hour of nothingness to follow. It's the flatness of going through the motion of passion that sadly comes off as two sad people who may have surface beauty but unlike the actors portraying them nothing else inside.
So for nearly two hours, you're waiting for something to really happen, some sort of emotional explosion between the two, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake as this overly quiet film at times becomes painful because of the silence. For a film set in Italy, it certainly lacks passion, and that's one thing you expect from Sharif, one of the sexiest actors of the 1960's. Aimee certainly is gorgeous, but she feels soulless, like she's only go through the motions of loving and is uncapable of really giving even when there is a slight blip of romance between them finally 65 minutes into the film.
So what you don't get from the leads, you hope you'll find with the supporting cast, but outside of Lotte Lenya (fresh from her success on Broadway in "Cabaret"), they all seem artificial and just like walking words that barely jumped off the paper and onto the screen. Even under the direction of Sidney Lumet, this fails to be anything more then on occasional beautiful piece of artwork that you looked at briefly but really can't figure out. Perhaps it's a lesson of karma since Sharif basically stole her from his law partner, and even that story is not fully developed. Still, you can find some visual excitement with the locations particularly a romantic scene in the woods on a broken rowboat and later on a field that seem like they belong in another movie. When the camera in the helicopter filming the scene pulls up thousands of feet above them, it seems like it's time for the conclusion, but there's still another half hour of nothingness to follow. It's the flatness of going through the motion of passion that sadly comes off as two sad people who may have surface beauty but unlike the actors portraying them nothing else inside.