Gruppo di famiglia in un interno / Conversation Piece

A flawlessly staged document of despair. The summary and testament of an aristocratic free spirit, Marxist and aesthete, separated from death by only a mere hand's breadth of time. Rome, 1974. A palazzo full of paintings and memories. The master of the house is an ageing professor, dignified, subtle, yet only a shadow of his former self, living in seclusion in his inherited palace as if in a mausoleum. New tenants burst into his world, a generation younger jet-set nouveau riche and two generations younger luxury leftists, the embodiment of the here and now. An encounter, at first reluctant, then compliant, carried out by Visconti's doppelganger, as an awakening, as a responsibility taken on. A family emerges in the interior. But it is only a substitute, a parody – and it will break apart. What remains is the unbridgeable gap between the generations, the certainty of the degeneration of the left, which has betrayed its ideals, the premonition of a right-wing coup. No hope. No future. (H.T.)

Courtesy Cinecittà