Simply Perfect

Beautiful, moving film.

Absolutely Fantastic

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Great film about dark secrets and forbidden desire. Luchino Visconti depicts the life of a beautiful woman caught between her past and her present. Underneath her beauty she turns out to be filled with ugly and painful memories. Sandra (played by Claudia Cardinale) struggles with obscure feelings of guilt, alienation and questionable longings. After she takes her husband to her childhood home she finds herself thinking about her painful past. When her somewhat estranged brother shows up things turn out to be more obscure. Hidden secrets and feelings from the past seem to float to the surface once again. The o so beautiful Sandra turns out to be a complex and mysterious woman. A little more raw than most of Visconti's work, but still beautiful and authentic. A film about a woman struggling with her demons, both inside and outside of her.

About the very beautiful and sensational subtitles, including the car drive through the landscape - with dialogue! - and made without back projection, the burned film material in the right side of the screen might be a malfunction in the technical process, but is still maintained in the copy to stress the holocaust theme of Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa... (the original Italian title of "Sandra" spells a line from the 19th century poet Giacomo Leopardi, quoted later in the film). The burned or overexposed film material is by so far foreshadowing the burning of the plot's MacGuffin-like novel named "Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa" (literary "bright stars of the Bear"). Wonder, what the non-existing contents of the Thorah-like manuscript, who in a sense remind of film reels, really is, since it makes the blackmailed sister so upset? The burned film strip during the subtitles inspired the Swedish director, the newly departed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to burn the celloid in a scene of his film Persona.The burned edge can only be observed in the DVD version issued from the Japanese market, not in the American, cropped versions on VHS tape.

As they say, the characters in this movie are based on the Greek mythology, namely, the killed father (Agamemnon), his wife (Clytemnestra), her new husband (Aegisthus), the daughter, Sandra (Electra), the son, Gianni (Olestes) and ex-boyfriend of the daughter, Pietro (now he is a doctor but he comes form a tenant farmer family like in the original), and the Trojan War is replaced with the Second World War ... the story line is difficultly categorized into a direct adaptation like Mourning Becomes Electra (an O'Neill's play, made into a movie by Dudley Nichols 1947), however, it follows the traditions of the Greek tragedies : the past and the blood dominate and determine every destiny of the characters.Here, Andrew (the outsider) is an interesting character. Innocently, (without receiving an oracle!), he analyzes 'the curse' of the dead father rationally, objectively and very ordinarily in vain and opens Pandora's box with his 'good' foolhardiness. Besides, he judges Gianni according to 'his' ethics as a total stranger and raises his fist against his brother-in-law. And still he is never involved in the mythology and should walk away forever. Is he an incarnation of our prosaic civilization of today? The establishment that he is an American (who has a camera!) could be an irony in Visconti's own way?By the way, recently I watched Desperate Housewives, season 2, Episode 9, "That's Good, That's Bad", and suddenly I remembered the scene in which Gianni takes out the pills and threatens Sandra : George who took the pills menaces Bree ... (so I'm writing this comment now, but I know it's an exaggerated analogy, anyway....) Jean Sorel is heavenly beautiful. The scene in the water tower takes my breath away. César Franck's music suits the aestheticism of the director, too.If you are an amateur of Visconti's works, you might know this one doesn't end just as in the original script. Do you think Sandra flies across the ocean to join Andrew or she buries herself in her destined blood there eternally? Including Mourning Becomes Electra, it could be interesting to refer to also : 1. Les Enfants terribles / Jean-Pierre Melville (1950) 2. Höhenfeuer /Fredi M. Murer (1985) 3. Jeux d'artifices / Virginie Thévenet (1987) 4. La Banyera / Jesús Garay (1989 / fantastic!)

After watching "Sandra...", for the first time in mi life I wanted to know who the director was. It was 1966 and me 15, so until that moment, I was only interested in who starred what but never fully understood the director's work enormous importance. Since then, Visconti not only became one of my favorite directors ever but a parameter when judging a film. Actually, I had seen The leopard years before, when I was to young to notice more than the beauty in Cardinale and the sumptuous sets. About "Sandra" I still remember vividly not only how beautiful and glamorous Cardinale looked but how handsome and elegant Sorel was; how mysterious the whole black and white atmosphere was and the intriguing plot... which I didn't fully understood because even if the action seemed to say something, the subtitles said something else!. I thought then my mother was right when she used to tell me: You are too young to understand this and that. Well, not without relief, I learn, years later, than the subtitles had been made in Spain, during the Franco's days, so its censorship had erased all incest traces. After that, a new copy was made to match subtitles and story (and thats, thankfully, what you can find, at least in Spanish!). But even after so many years, and in my adulthood, I find Sandra as magical as the first time and still is one of my favorite movies, as many Visconti's works like Rocco and his brothers, Death in Venice or The dammed, as well, of course, The Leopard.