Benvenuta “Benvenuta” is the penultimate film of A. Delvaux, which does not contain the mysterious, dreamy atmosphere of “One Night on the Train” and “Dates at Bray”, only the tone of the high, beautiful melodrama brings it together with other works of this master. A few high-flown dialogues filled with poetic metaphors, at first, somewhat alarming the screened cinephile, because it is so easy, using this element, to slide into the templates of the genre, its ostentatious sentimentality.
However, the successful combination of dialogues, editing matches, elegance of camera work, photogenicity of F. Ardan and V. Gassman gives Benvenuta a certain filigree, the banality of the plot as not strangely fascinates by the unexpected angle of its presentation, chosen by Delvaux. The dramatic construction, unlike his other paintings, does not have excessive complexity, diffusion of the imaginary and real, however, the director uses the composition of the envelope, putting the fictional story of Benvenuta in the story of the meeting of the writer and reader who invented it.
Delvo saturates the melodramatic narrative with exquisite eroticism, which we in the age of pornography almost forgot to perceive as the true beauty of the senses. Nevertheless, the love story of a French pianist and a devout Italian is not without some literaryness, artificially raised intonation, however, the fact that we are literary characters makes this technique justified.
Delvaux has always gravitated towards pictographic composition, likening the frame to an animated picture, consciously weakening the narrative component, in Benvenuth he is true to himself, especially in scenes of expressive piano performance or meetings of lovers separated by circumstances. But, despite the fact that a thick rhythm sometimes drags into the atmosphere of a measured sleep, the story itself does not touch, since its flaunted fictitiousness creates a detachment effect, preventing the viewer from immersed in the film.
As in his other paintings, Delvaux is captured by a female archetypal image, which becomes an object of worship and self-discovery for male characters, but in this case, the vow of the hero Gasman looks ridiculous and ridiculous obstacle to love, which also prevents one from being imbued with the poetry of the tape. Creating a stylistically homogeneous work, Delvo does not allow obvious formal errors, but the simplification of the previously characteristic plot multidimensionality makes Benvenuta albeit beautiful, rising above the average level, but still a melodrama.