Villa Malaparte was mentioned here and there in the last few posts about the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition. The villa actually appears also in Liliana Cavani's La pelle (The Skin, 1981).
Based on the eponymous novel by Curzio Malaparte and featuring Marcello Mastroianni as Malaparte himself, Claudia Cardinale as Princess Consuelo Caracciolo and Burt Lancaster as General Mark Clark, the film tells the story of the Allies liberating Naples in 1943, focusing on the life of the locals who seem to have collectively lost their morality and dignity to survive the tragedy of the war.
Kurt Erich Suckert was born in 1898, and started using the pseudonym Curzio Malaparte in the early 1920s when he began writing.
Attracted by some aspects of Fascism, Malaparte became an ideologue of the movement, but in the '30s he changed his ideas and, in 1933, after writing what was considered as an anti-fascist essay, he was exiled on the Island of Lipari.
He started building his villa on Capri in 1936 and the building soon became the favourite meeting place of many artists and intellectuals. Malaparte went to live there in 1943, after Mussolini's fall.
Cavani's film (with many thanks to Kutmusic for digging a copy of this film from its archives for the screenshots in this post) looks at Malaparte, a captain in the Second World War, as he collaborates with the Allies.
Villa Malaparte is mainly showed at the beginning and in the central part of the film. While Godard in Le Mépris used the exterior of the building as a dramatic yet poetic set for his characters, Cavani mainly used the interior, with the four large windows of the main salon opening on the surrounding landscape.
When the film opens the American Allies are using the villa for a press conference about liberating Naples. The main salon with his windows is therefore not a stage, but a room used to record vitally important news that will be send back to the States.
The roof of the villa reappears then during a short scene in which Malaparte and Princess Caracciolo are shown dining together and in another scene with a special visitor, selfish aviator Deborah Wyatt (Alexandra King).
All Malaparte's American visitors marvel at the beauty of the villa, even the cold and detached Wyatt expresses surprise and enchantment.
The villa is an oasis of tranquillity and peace in this film, a place where humanity seems possible again and its stark walls, large windows and beautiful landscapes create dramatic constrasts when compared to the noisy brothels, the derelict houses, the crumbling palazzi of the decadent aristocracy and the shabby streets of Naples where the main actions take place.
Criticised for its anti-American slant, the film actually features extremely moving, tragic and quite disturbing parts, with unexpectedly ironic moments (a Neapolitan tailor is reduced to produce blonde merkins for prostitutes to cater to the tastes of American soldiers ...).
Apart from boasting a famous cast, the film also has some great fashion connections: Mastroianni was dressed by Piattelli (his official tailor), costumes (miltary uniforms by Ugo Pericoli) were designed by Piero Tosi and made at two famous tailoring houses - Umberto Tirelli's and Annamode; costume jewellery was created by Nino Lembo and further jewels were supplied by Bulgari, while the hair stylist was Grazia De Rossi (production design by Dante Ferretti). It would therefore be almost too easy to do an analysis of this film not just from an architectural, but also a fashion point of view.
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