‘La prima notte di quiete‘, the 1972 film by Valerio Zurlini , has three different titles. It was released on the English speaking market as ‘Indian Summer‘, a title that has an explanation somewhere in the film, but has little to do with what happens on screen. In France it is known as ‘Le professeur‘. The film is an Italian-French co-production, but can be considered as belonging to Italian cinema. It is the penultimate of the only nine feature films left by Zurlini, a director whose life and career have been roo short, enough to leave behind a few solid films, including this one, but no masterpiece. ‘La prima notte di quiete‘ can be described as being somewhere between a romantic social drama and existential cinema. It is an interesting film, with many qualities, even if it fails to reach the peaks of those years by Pasolini or Antonioni, the masters of the respective genres in the Italian cinema of the time.
The film opens with a very beautifully filmed scene (like the whole film) on kind of a ‘Quai des Brumes‘. The lonely man by the sea is the literature teacher Daniele Dominici (Alain Delon), who has just arrived in the city of Rimini, which in this film looks more like a port city at the North Sea than on the Adriatic Sea. We are in the early ’70s, in the midst of a sexual revolution, and the teacher has been in a relationship sprinkled with infidelity on both sides and routinely threatened by boredom for several years with Monica (Lea Massari), a woman his age (30+). He tries to balance his life with a passion for card games, which gets him in touch with the libertine underworld environment of the city. Daniele notices in his class Vanina (Sonia Petrovna), a 19-year-old young woman. The interest for the girl, who is beautiful and different from her colleagues, turns into attraction, and then into devouring passion, despite or maybe just fuelled by differences in age, class and culture, and by the dangerous environment and dubious entourage of the girl.
Zurlini planned to make out of this film a first episode in a more complex social and family saga, covering several decades of post-war Italian history. There are some clues in the film about the teacher’s father, a venerated hero who fell in the war, and the ending broadens the context by alluding to the family that does not play another role in the plot. As this film remained the only one in the planned cycle, it remains rather a snapshot of a specific moment in the history of Italy – the early 70s – and of a well-defined social environment, that of provincial cities touched by a modernity with mixed consequences while facing a conservatism of another era that is struggling to maintain its influence. Alain Delon creates a role specific to this peak period of his career, that of the man who internalises his feelings in an inner boil. Sonia Petrovna is a fascinating partner, with a look foretelling Monica Bellucci, in the role of a brutally grown-up young woman. In addition to Lea Massari, Alida Valli, another legend of Italian film, also appears in an episodic role. Dario Di Palma‘s cinematography brings to life the image of a coastal Italy very different from that of tourist postcards. Some frames are anthological, such as that of the sea and the sky captured in the same grey colour and separated only by a restless horizon line. Mario Nascimbene‘s soundtrack uses copiously jazz music with saxophone and trumpet solos. There are many good reasons to see ‘La prima notte di quiete‘ and just as many reasons to regret that this film remained just a building block of an unfinished edifice.