Directed by Luchino Visconti
Based on l'Innocente (1892), by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Screenplay by Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, and Enrico Medioli.
Released in 1976.

Cast

Tullio Hermil.............Giancarlo Giannini
Teresa Raffo.............Jennifer O'Neill
Giuliana Hermil........Laura Antonelli
Filippo D'Arborio....................Marc Porel
Federico Hermil........Didier Haudepin
 

Story

    The action takes place in Rome towards the end of the 19th century. At a fencing club, we are introduced to Tullio Hermil, a dashing man who terminates his match in order to attend a musical evening. There, Teresa Raffo, a beautiful society woman, blackmails Tullio, who is her lover, to make him leave with her rather than with his wife Giuliana, who also unexpectedly attends the evening. In order to avoid a scandal, Tullio refuses, and Raffo leaves with another man, Count Egano. Unable to stand his jealousy, Tullio concocts an excuse, leaves without his wife, and joins Raffo at her apartment. The following day, with complete nonchalance, Tullio confesses the affair to his wife because, he says, this time the thing is serious. He did not mention his previous infidelities because she had agreed to marry him knowing he might seek love elsewhere. But now, he is totally infatuated with Raffo and has decided to go to Florence with her. For Giuliana, he says, he now feels affection and respect but not love. He acknowledges that she has a right to leave him, but asks her to stay. He asks his brother Federico occasionally to visit Giuliana to se how she is doing while he is in Florence.
    As Federico is dining with some friends in the house, Giuliana knocks at the door and when he opens it, she faints. The writer Filippo D'arborio, one of Federico's guests, sits her on an armchair, showing great concern. In the meantime, in Florence, Tullio, exasperated by Egano's attentions towards Raffo, challenges him to a duel.
    At a musical evening in Rome, while a singer performs "Che faro' senza Euridice," we learn that Egano is back in Rome with Raffo, who has now broken with Tullio. Giuliana seems to have her eyes set on D'Arborio when Tullio appears. He tells Giuliana what happened and makes clear his intention to see Raffo again. Later, back in their house, Tullio complains to Giuliana about Raffo, describing her as a liar, unattainable and untrustworthy. He suffers from weakness of the will: he insists that he should not see Raffo again, but he is desperately in love with her: even his suffering makes him feel alive. Still, he asks Giuliana's to help to resist his passion for Raffo. She consents.
Tullio has not seen Raffo for some days. One morning, he hears Giuliana sing "Che faro' senza Euridice." She is wearing a new perfume and, she says, she is going to a sale. On her desk, he finds a novel by D'Arborio with an extravagant personal dedication to Giuliana. Upset, he deprecates D'Arborio's literary skills, while Giuliana insist that she loves D'Arborio's writings. Later in the morning, Tullio goes to the sale in order to find Giuliana, but she is not there. Instead, he sees Raffo. They rekindle their affair. In her house, after they have made love in front of the fireplace, she tells him that he is an egoistic and domineering lover. He also learns from Raffo that Giuliana was not at the sale, and shows distress at her suggestion that Giuliana might be having an affair. As he returns home, he learns that Giuliana has gone to the Badiola, a villa where Tullio's mother leaves. Later, at the fencing club, Tullio meets D'Arborio, and has a fencing match with him, while he starts being consumed by jealousy.
    As Tullio's affair with Raffo is again flourishing, she convinces a distracted Tullio to go to Paris with her. However, he changes his mind at the last minute, and instead goes to the Badiola. Giuliana and Tullio go to Villalilla, as nearby villa where they had gone when first married. There, Tullio and Giuliana seem to rekindle their desire for each other. As they lie in bed, Tullio asks Giuliana to start their relation afresh, lest they continue their unhappy life. Although Giuliana tells him that this is not possible, Tullio insists that Giuliana should become his lover, after having been his wife and his sister; Giuliana seems to succumb to Tullio's desire.
    Back at the Badiola, Tullio learns from his mother that Giuliana is pregnant. When he confronts Giuliana, he learns that the father, whom we infer to be D'Arborio, knows nothing of it. Giuliana tells him that she succumbed to a momentary weakness, but Tullio tells here that as he was free to have a lover, so was she. However, Giuliana expresses regret: she had sworn in front of God to be Tullio's faithful wife, and she failed to keep that oath. This, however, does not impress Tullio; the only important thing, he implies, is that she feel for him the same passion he feels for her. Suddenly, a man in a fencing outfit appears at the door, and Tullio's first unthinking reaction is to take him for D'Arborio. He is, of course, wrong: it is Federico, who asks Tullio help him with fencing practice. In the ensuing match, Tullio, unable to overcome the anger and jealousy Federico/ D'Arborio excites in him, looses his calm and lashes at his brother with some unfair strokes.
    Later, Tullio visits Giuliana and asks her to have an abortion. As Giuliana refuses by appealing to her religious views, Tullio undresses her, remarking that if her affair with D'Arborio is really over, then she should not have any problem in following his suggestion. She insist that abortion is a crime, and that the only solution is for her to leave Tullio. He, however, resists the suggestion. He tells her that since he's an atheist, he must make his own rules of conduct for which he is solely responsible. In a situation such as theirs, having an abortion is not a solution of convenience, but one which faces the truth of existence: there's no God and no afterlife full of rewards and punishment. Still, he concludes, she alone can decide what to do. After they make love, he tells her that he shall go to Rome to arrange everything.
Tullio asks Federico to set up a casual meeting with D'Arborio, and goes to Rome.
    In Rome, Tullio  meets Raffo, intending to tell her that their affair is over. In a restaurant, they are told by Federico that D'Arborio is very sick and unlikely to survive a tropical disease. Raffo expresses her sadness at the piece of news, and tells Tullio that she is less upset at their breaking up than she thought she would. Later that night, Federico tells Tullio that D' Arborio was the idol of Roman ladies, but that he certainly had no affair with Raffo. He was not only a great writer, but the only man who could make Federico feel ashamed of his senseless life of money, sophistication and pleasure. Tullio is apparently unmoved.  The following day, Tullio receives a letter from his wife telling him that she won't come to Rome. He returns to the Badiola. Giuliana tells him that she won't have an abortion: she would rather leave. After pointing out that the child would then grow up without a father, Tullio insists that if he could be sure that Giuliana's decision is based only on her morals and not on her feelings for D'Arborio, that she is his and his alone, then he would be prepared to raise the child; the true father, he says, is the one who raises and educates a child. One morning, he learns from the paper that D'Arborio has died; he makes sure that Giuliana sees the paper, trying to see from her reaction whether she still loves the dead writer. She tells him to stop tormenting himself.
    Several months have passed, and Giuliana gives birth to a boy; the doctor tells Tullio that she has a strange reaction: she cries and does not want to see the baby. As days go by, neither Tullio nor Giuliana show any interest in the baby. However, an ever more suspicious Tullio confronts Giuliana, who has surreptitiously been visiting her son every night. She tells him that she does not love the baby, and agrees to leave the Badiola with Tullio after Christmas.
    It is Christmas eve, and everyone but Tullio has gone to mass. Left alone with the baby, he decides to kill him by exposing him to the bitterly cold weather. People return from mass and a short time later the baby dies. In a dreadful confrontation Giuliana tells Tullio that she always loved her baby as much as she always loved his father: all she did and told him was pretense in order to save her child. She tells an incredulous Tullio that shall leave him and atone for her son's death, and that she hopes Tullio will be as miserable as she is. All she feels for him is hate and despise.
    The movie cuts to Tullio and Raffo. Tullio has told her the whole affair: his only regrets is having taken part in such a cheap story. Raffo tells him that he is unlikely to have killed the baby merely by exposing him to the cold. Tullio, however, answers that intentions are what matters, and that he certainly intended to kill the baby; still, he notes, he feels no remorse and believes that human justice cannot touch him. Back at his house, Raffo tells him that he has something ugly within his soul: he is clearly still deeply in love with Giuliana but has no hope of winning her back because his two rivals are both dead. Tullio tells Raffo she is wrong: the real loser, he claims, is Giuliana, who lives in the past and does not understand that free people have to solve their problems on this earth and not appeal to a hypothetical afterlife. Only this life matters, he insists, and if he were to find no pleasure or interest in life, he would end it. Raffo replies that these are mere words: we do not know what the future has prepared for us; we might stop living and start merely existing, and therefore end up by putting our hopes in an afterlife. Raffo bemoans the fact that men tend either to idolize women or to debase them instead of treating them as their equals. When Tullio seemingly intimates that he would like to live with Raffo, she replies she does not love him any longer. Worse, although she finds him attractive, she would not want to feel unworthy of her own life if she were to be the total arbiter of it. As Raffo seems to doze off in spite of Tullio prayer to the contrary, Tullio shoots himself. Horrified, she leaves the villa.
 
 

Analysis

    Visconti's last movie (he died in 1976, as the film was being edited) is based on a novel by Gabriele D' Annunzio (1863-1938) who, when he wrote it, was the greatest Italian representative of decadentism. Decadentism was a cultural movement which empasized sensuality, aesthetic refinement, subjectivism, great interest in introspective analysis of one's experiences and one's states of mind, and a belief in the right of elect men to flaunt moral and societal values. In particular, partially because of the hostility between the new Italian State and the Pope, decadentists were hostile to established religion (in the specific case, Catholicism), which was viewed as hypocritical and oppressive of the desire and the need of elect men to live according to their own lights.  A decadentist, then, was an aesteticist in Schmitt's sense.
    Tullio Hermil, embodies all the characteristics typical of decadentism. Perceiving most societal and religious codes as life-negating and destructive of freedom, he consciously rejects them. He is also very much absorbed in himself (he seems to enjoy analyzing his state of mind in great detail) and bent on the satisfaction of his own sensuality; consequently, his rejection of accepted mores has no liberating effect on others, whom he thinks of only within the framework of his own pleasure or needs. His affair with Raffo is one of psychological strife and domination, and his attempt at turning Giuliana into 'sister, wife and lover' is not only too late, but self-serving. Worse, while his brother Federico seems to have friends, Tullio seems to have none; his acquaintances are people with whom he seems to be engaged in constant competition either at the fencing club, or in Raffo's (or Giuliana's) bed. This is why the movie, for all its sumptuous interior shots and the cultural sophistication often displayed, is permeated by a tense and almost unpleasant atmosphere of aggression and competition.
    Having rejected society and God as sources of moral values, Tullio must find them in himself; he must, in other words, become his own law-giver. This, per se, is neither unfortunate nor peculiar: after all, for example, Kant's system of categorical imperatives is based in the agent. In addition, Tullio seems ready to allow his moral codes to be universal in the sense of being valid for everyone (or at least for everyone in his class). He is a 'free' man, and makes a point of telling Giuliana that she should be a 'free' woman; as he was justified in having a lover, so was Giuliana, although she tells him that her affair was not due to her desire to claim the right of a 'free' woman, but to momentary weakness. What's more, Tullio respects Giuliana as a free agent: although he makes his feelings on the issue very clear, he does tell her that having the baby or not is ultimately up to her. Occasionally, he even manages to say things which many would reasonably consider right, for example that the 'real' father need not be the biological one.
    However, Tullio's moral world view bristles with problems. His decision to pursue a type of sensuality which requires the unique possession of the thing loved, or lusted after, makes his goals dependent exactly on those, like Raffo or Giuliana, whom he must dominate, and therefore ultimately antagonize. The result is that Tullio is often unhappy and unfulfilled: the constant pursuit of his sensuality condemns him to be alone. As Raffo perceptively tells him after they made love in front of the fireplace, he is an egoistic and domineering lover; he is, she tells him at the end of the movie, a monster whom she does not love any longer and with whom she doesn't want to live. The reason, she notes, is not Tullio's murder, but what brought it about. She does not spell out what this is, but presumably she has in mind Tullio's almost pathological desire totally to possess the thing loved together with his belief that he is his only possible moral judge. At the end, Tullio lives in a sort of spiritual vacuum and he knows it; he finally understands that a life devoted to the pursuit of his type of sensuality is not satisfying and ultimately not even pleasurable. Unable to see any other value in life worth living for, he kills himself.
    Tullio's failure, however, is not accidental. His world view is an extreme manifestation of a society (or better, a social class) in which wealth, power, and culture have become so abundant that they are taken for granted, and which, consequently, in the absence of great civil ideals, finds it hard to avoid the growth of extreme individualism and solipsism. But extreme individualism, when not in the service of a value perceived as higher than the individual pursuing it, be that art understood as an end in itself, or God, or something else, naturally leads its more thoughtful practitioners to a sense of meaninglessness. The point is made by Federico, who tells Tullio how their own lives are ultimately senseless ("we have money, education, we travel, we enjoy ourselves, have fun, do this and that; but for what?"). But Tullio does not understand this in time or, more likely, pretends not to. The result is a circle of unhappiness which not only destroys his and Giuliana's lives, but culminates in the murder of the innocent baby.