Original Publication – Newsweek, August 8, 1977
The style of LA GRANDE BOURGEOISE is too elegantly overwrought for the story it tells. Beautifully crafted, the movie often plays like a languid tone poem, content to linger over gorgeous turn-of-the-century Italian landscapes or Catherine Deneuve’s exquisite face, when it ought to get down to business. Director Mauro Bolognini has the makings of a first-rate murder conspiracy and morality play, which he overpaints with distracting cinematic techniques.
Based on an actual scandal that took place in Bologna in 1897 – the Murri Affair – the film chronicles the murder of Deneuve’s hateful husband by her gifted but hotheaded brother, Giancarlo Giannini. Deneuve and Giannini are children of the prominent Professor Murri, a free-thinker and atheist whom Fernando Rey plays with a winning combination of sensitivity and confusion. Because of Giannini’s plans to run for office as a socialist and the family’s position as leading intellectuals, the case is first tried in the press and becomes a vehicle for the conservative Catholic Establishment to discredit the Murris and the ideas they stand for.
Radically Chic: The state’s instrument is the police inspector – brilliantly acted by Marcel Bozzufi, the hired assassin of “Z” and “The French Connection” – who conceives of himself as the defender of the established order. A middle class bureaucrat, he hates the Murris for being radically chic. The film takes off as the inspector unravels the conspiracy with a tenacity that is counterpointed against the despair of his ideological enemy, the professor. Both Bozzufi and Rey, though secondary characters, are more interesting than Deneuve and Giannini, whose energy seems lost in the haze of filtered lenses.
With its references to current events in Italy, the lot of women and the limits of responsibility of parents to children and servant to state, “La Grande Bourgeoise” is superior to much of what is around on the screen today. But what could have been a great film of passion and politics is never brought into sharp enough focus by Bolognini. He settles for being pretty instead of pithy.
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