Sunday | June 17, 2018 7:00 pm

Obsession
(Ossessione)

Recently Restored

Directed by Luchino Visconti.
With Clara Calamai, Massimo Girotti, Dhia Cristiani.
Italy, 1943, DCP, black & white, 140 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

Ossessione occupies an otherworldly zone between classical and postwar cinema. This hypnotic, first-ever adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (a book given to Visconti by Jean Renoir on the set of A Day in the Country) is an oneiric journey of murder and wayward passions. Or more accurately, the film is an anti-journey. As scholar Giuliana Minghelli has noted, the lovers—the stifled wife of a hotelier and a handsome stranger—are damningly drawn back to the gloomy inn on the Po River again and again. A fatalistic tragedy of Mussolini’s Italy, Ossessione is a political fulmination.