Turning a sensational crime story into a murky erotic drama is exactly what Andrea De Sica does in his new film, The Eyes of Others, which is screening in the Official Competition of the 20th Rome Film Fest. In his third feature for the big screen – after Children of the Night [+lee también:
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entrevista: Andrea De Sica
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ficha de la película] – the filmmaker, born into an artistic family, draws loosely on the Casati Stampa case, in which the Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino killed his wife, Anna Fallarino, and her young lover before taking his own life. The crime took place in Rome in 1970 and caused a sensation, not least for the salacious details that emerged about the couple’s private life. De Sica’s film, however, unfolds entirely on the marquis’s former island, where his now-abandoned villa still stands, on Zannone (Pontine Islands).

Love at first sight strikes instantly between Lelio (Filippo Timi) and Elena (Jasmine Trinca) when they meet on the private island where the former – the marquis – hosts friends every weekend for hunting, swimming and wild parties. It is 1960. Lelio has a wife, and Elena is with a friend of his, yet it does not take long before the two end up in bed together – hardly in secret. A few years later, we see them happily married, fully complicit in their transgressions: Lelio likes to watch his wife having sex with other men and films her with his camera. The island is their kingdom, a place where their free-spirited recklessness feeds every fantasy. Elena strolls naked before their friends, and Lelio fires at tourist boats trying to reach the shore, driving them away. Everything is steeped in a decadent, D’Annunzian atmosphere, with nobles and courtiers relaxing by the sea under a blinding sun.

More years pass – the film is structured into four acts – and the tone of their relationship changes markedly. Elena is depressed. The elegant clifftop villa has become a prison. Lelio, increasingly possessive and domineering towards his wife, summons a witch to remove the evil eye and even tries to buy her a baby, the child they evidently cannot have together. A new, younger and more modern group of friends arrives for the weekend – we are now in 1967. Among them is Cesare (Matteo Olivetti). Another thunderbolt, this time between the young man and Elena, nudges the marquis into madness. The final time jump takes us to New Year’s Eve, 1970, when Lelio exacts his revenge during a party in masks that is both comical and unsettling.

Sex, transgression, morbid curiosity and power games collide in the abstract space of this island, cut off from the rest of the world, where pleasures of the flesh and passion set the rules. De Sica subtly captures the stifling climate of this gilded cage, the dark side of a wealthy, bored and arrogant high society that keeps pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable, and the shifting phases of a love that slides into obsession – with the tragic outcomes that still fill the crime pages today.

The Eyes of Others was produced by Vivo Film, Wildside and Vision Distribution in collaboration with Sky. International sales are handled by Vision Distribution.