Word: tancredi
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...Author Hazzard proves that she writes like no one except herself. And she proves it the hard way by choosing a worn theme that a single sentimental slip could have transformed into a ladies'-magazine romance. Sophie, not-too-young, not-too-attractive, visits Italy and meets Tancredi, a dapper, middle-aged architect living apart from his wife and family. Because Sophie seems to him like a piece of important information he must acquire, Tancredi sets out to seduce her. Sophie finally, almost wearily, succumbs. Then the cool lovers discover that they are madly in love-but briefly, advisedly...
...elegiac novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa chronicles this transformation. But The Leopard is more than a retelling of aristocratic decline. It is also a voyage through the consciousness of Don Fabrizio, who struggles to make sense of the paradox presented to him by his revolutionary nephew, Tancredi: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Partially tied to the old order, partially sympathetic with the new, and yet truly part of neither, Don Fabrizio's mind refracts the differences and similarities between the feudal landowners and the assertive middle class...
...swift flow of images turns to honey from this point on; although the scenes are even richer, too much sweetness at too slow a pace becomes cloying. Don Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster) decides that Tancredi (Alain Delon) should marry Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the richly dowered daughter of the ambitious mayor, rather than his own shy daughter, Concetta. The last third of the film is spent at a ball for the couple. An excess of eating, drinking, and dancing causes lethargy for the guests and unfortunately for the viewer as well...
...swooning old ladies could be taken from any number of films. And Visconti does not merely present them; he dwells on them. Moreover, he takes two of Lampedusa's most vivid characters and drams them of life. Don Calegro, the uneducated but shrewd mayor, becomes a drunken buffoon. Tancredi, the Prince's favorite, undergoes a rather obvious transition from youthful revolutionary to foppish conservative as the middle class reaction to change sets...
...grand ball in Palermo, Tancredi's fiancée is introduced to Sicilian society. As the Prince waltzes with her, he smiles wistfully. He has done his duty, he has built a bridge to the future. His children will cross it, he will not. He will stay in the past, bound there by affection, by habit, by sloth, by congenital dislike of tomorrow, by the siren lure of a torrid, torpid land that makes its children long "voluptuously for death." As the film ends he kneels and, yearning upward to the morning star, prays passionately for death: "O faithful...