Synopsis

The film tells the emotional dilemma of Carlo, divided between his wife Silvia and a young girl, Lu. Carlo shares an apartment with Silvia in the respectable Roman neighborhood of Parioli, hiding nothing of his relationship with Lu and accepting the fact that Silvia is courted by other men. Lu in turn lives in his country house; from here Carlo talks often at length with his wife on the phone and, during one of these conversations, discovers the existence of a young man who is seeing Silvia. The appearance of this fourth character marks the story's start: the story of an obsession in which long dialogues delve into Silvia's mystery and bring Carlo progressively closer to the truth. Silvia is increasingly involved with her young, mysterious, violent lover and finally asks Carlo not to return to the house in Rome. Carlo begins roaming the city, finding it both threatening and sinister, in a vain attempt to give this young man a face. Together the married couple leave for Sicily where Silvia confides to Carlo a number of details that only increase her husband's obsessiveness. Upon their return, the crisis with Lu erupts: Carlo, transformed by anxiety, discharges his repressed violence on the girl. Again he hastily departs, this time for Venice, where Silvia, who is increasingly attempting to escape, has asked him to join her. In Venice, Carlo finally understands that his wife is the prey of her vicious lover, and that she is contemplating some definitive, drastic gesture. He leaves her, saying goodbye for the last time at the train station. Carlo in his turn is left by Lu, thus losing the impulsive freedom of the idyllic life he had with her. He also bids farewell to Sergio, the friend he had stayed with in Rome. Winter arrives. Sergio telephones to tell Carlo of his wife's death. The two friends go together to the morgue and stand beside Silvia's corpse, disfigured by countless razor slashes. The accompanying music, written by Berlioz, is Romeo's song at Juliette's tomb.

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Human existence is disorderly, a disorder originating in the distance, much more remote than sexual action but in zones of energy nevertheless sexual, and still for the most part veiled in the shadow of the unknown. And so it develops and mates in disorder, producing and reproducing still further disorder and further unknown, in turn producing still more unknown before becoming that small, minute part of the known which is our understanding, our birth and our brief appearance in this world. Disorder is in life. In the fact that it produced us, and that it continues through the major and minor traumas accompanying our growth, our childhood, our adolescence, our maturity, old age and death. Utter disorder opens our eyes to the disorder and randomness of the world; disorder is our development, disorder is our first instincts and desires or pleasures, so much so that each of us knows more or less innocently that we have loved peers of both sexes, driven by completely disordered and misunderstood urgings: an afternoon behind bushes in the country, with cows grazing, the heat, the odour of human excrement and a green fly; a promiscuous swim in a canal; the smell of the hair of a boy from the south just out of the sea; the sweat of a little girl playing tennis, her face all flushed; our throat closed (beyond our control) by the first kisses and caresses and a first true love. Complete disorder.

Goffredo Parise

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An Interview With Fanny Ardant

How did you get involved with this project?

I'd bought the book from a bookstore like anyone else. I was drawn to the title and the photo of the author, Goffredo Parise. I said to myself, "It's rare to find a writer who's so good-looking!" I read the book in one go and, when I put it down, I thought that if I were to adapt a book for the cinema, it would be that one. So I sent off a letter to Parise's widow, the painter Giosetta Fioroni, and we met but I got tied up with other projects and that was that. Except that Mario Martone had written a screenplay based on the book and sent it to Giosetta. When she told him about my interest, he exclaimed, "Fanny Ardant! That's who I want to play Silvia!"

What attracted you especially to the part of Silvia?

I adored the idea of a woman who reaches a certain point in her life and decides to prepare her death. That's what she's looking for in her affair with the young man. For me, Silvia still loves Carlo but rather than staying home waiting for him to call, she deliberately goes looking for danger. Why? For her, it's like a farewell to arms. She knows that with Carlo the love will ebb away, the physical pleasure will ebb away. Yet he is the only one who can save her. That's what I adored in the book, but of course I read it from Silvia's viewpoint when there's another way of reading it: from Carlo's point of view.

How does he react?

He's scared she'll find pleasure with someone else. He's obsessed with the other guy's sex because he knows that he will never be young and virile again. And when Silvia tells him that her lover can be violent and threatening, his reaction is, "Did you give him the keys to the house?" Carlo's a womanizer. He needs to conquer. Emotionally and spiritually, he's got all he needs with Silvia. And then, there's sex. Deep down, Silvia is like his soulmate. But Carlo is the vulgar one, who says to her, "Isn't one man enough for you? You need two now?"

What was it like working with Mario Martone?

Mario knows precisely what he wants. He's very intelligent, so I could put my faith in him. That's when you can take risks because you know that the director will sense when to slow you down. It may not seem like much but for an actor it's vital.

And working in Italian, in Italy?

Acting in another language is such an adrenalin rush. Mario said to me, "I don't care if you make mistakes, the important thing is to talk quickly. There's no point speaking perfect Italian slowly." Parise was in love with Rome and the story is an ode to the city. Mario cleverly tapped into that but as an actress, in terms of my character and what she's saying, the story could just as easily take place in Tokyo.

Did you find it difficult shooting the sex scenes and the scenes where Silvia talks explicitly about sex?

Not difficult, thrilling. I gave a tremendous amount in those scenes because I loved and understood Silvia. Everything seemed very clear to me. That's not to say it was easy but I knew what I had to do.

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An Interview With Michele Placido

In your opinion, as an actor but also as a director, what are the essential elements that distinguish Mario Martone's approach to directing from that of other Italian directors?

For me, Mario is a master. And there aren't many: Bellocchio, for example, and Moretti, to name a few. He has a purity of style, and by purity I mean conceding nothing to mere taste, to pleasing spectators. He's distinguished by his ability to make the viewer see himself in a film. He provokes those who want to be provoked. His work attempts to involve the filmgoers from the human point of view, with real events common to us all. He refuses to adopt those easy, "sentimental" solutions that, even when well done, don't communicate passion. For an actor this effort is difficult to sustain, but exhilarating; it's like exploring a new dimension.

As a director, I've learned a lot from him. And the lesson, though I know he won't approve of the term, is that being an artist can't be taken for granted: not everyone is capable of becoming an "auteur" the way he has.

It's easy to imagine that working with Fanny Ardant was more than a little interesting...

Yes, remember that it was she who first wanted the film rights to the book. She had already opted for them before Martone offered her the part. But above all I learned to respect her as a woman. For her beauty, that goes without saying, but I was even more fascinated by her intelligence, an intelligence that I'd say was lucid, even illuminating. Fanny is a true intellectual. What other actress would have taken the initiative to opt for a novel by an author like Parise, an Italian author at that. In this she's typically French.

What aspect of your collaboration did you find most intriguing?

The thing about her that struck me most was her way of observing, and how she moved before shooting a scene. First thing in the morning, five minutes before shooting, most actresses in their dressing rooms are all busy with their makeup, with the lights ... they're almost, how can I say it, flustered. Instead Fanny is reserved, and this interior elegance leaves its mark, she transmits it to everyone around her. And this enticing capacity of communicating the "essential" gets effortlessly carried over onto the set. To some extent, I feel like I've "stolen" from her a kind of introspectiveness that came over me before shooting a scene.

The dominant and decisive viewpoint of the film is masculine. What does "the scent of blood" signify for Michele Placido? And for Carlo?

I'd say it's easier for Michele Placido to live with it. Carlo allows himself to be anaesthetized by the scent of blood and enters into a kind of paralysis under its influence. Carlo is unable to react once threatened by emotion, by strong feelings. Maybe he's too intellectual. The proof of this is that he's incapable of managing intrigue with Silvia. He gives up when confronted by the scent of blood: he's unable to save her. He doesn't do all he can to help her, either as a man or as a companion, and for this he bears the guilt.

How would you describe the part the physical distance between Carlo and Silvia plays in the film?

It creates a void that cannot be filled, the incapacity of living with intimacy. Even though he still loves Silvia (in fact he's always talking about her to Lu), he's incapable of remaining by her side, however much this pains him. He refuses to accept physical decay, the idea of approaching physical decline, whether it be Silvia's or his own. He wants to remember her exactly as she was when they first fell in love. During their endless telephone calls he succeeds in freezing this moment: from a distance he manages to preserve her youth, the way he wants her to remain.

In the film suffering is closely linked to pleasure. What is it the film has to teach us about human beings?

Complexity. The film demonstrates the interdependency between suffering and pleasure. And not just intense sexual pleasure, which is certainly represented, but also (and this thanks to Lu and Carlo's relationship with her) those "flashes of extraordinary bliss" that Carlo experiences as if he were still uncompromised by life. The same thing I feel in my private life while watching my children, when I see that for them living is still "a great adventure". Whenever I see that they still experience the most commonplace and the most extraordinary events in the same way, without prejudice. And this because they haven't yet experienced life's suffering. As long as one remains intact, every moment is lived completely.

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The Scent of Blood, a shocking new film, marks the return of Mario Martone to cinema

Mario Martone, how did you come by this new film after not directing for the last three years?

I was inspired by a book from the Veneto author Goffredo Parise. The novel was written in 1981, but then left in a drawer until the author took it up again two months before his death in 1986, and subsequently published posthumously ten years later. Like an unexploded time-bomb, when it appeared it wasn't speaking the literary Italian of the '70s, but rather the language that we speak today.

My discovery of Parise was decisive: a liberated author, far from the usual commonplace ideas and without the clear-cut ideological position of a writer like Pasolini.

After travelling around the world and reporting on the violence he had seen in countries like China, Vietnam and Biafra, Parise talks about the inherent disorder of intimacy in The Scent of Blood.

And so intimacy and sexuality are key points in the film...

Parise had, as we all do, a complex attitude towards sex. He was convinced that sexuality had to be lived while ignoring Catholic morality, and he described this beautifully in one of his articles on Japan, a country he loved and deeply understood.

What struck me when I first read the novel in 1997 was how Parise's telling of the story was in some way therapeutic, in the same way as it had been for me, at least in the beginning.

I was emerging from a tunnel of suffering, suffering for the most part self-inflicted, one of those periods in which one's relationship with words is difficult. When you don't know what you can, or even what you want to say; when you no longer know what's worth or not worth saying; when everything's a mess. I was struck by the head-on way this novel attacks words; in the end words are even more scandalous than sex.

While reading the book you must have already had an idea of how to treat the film...

Not at all, at first I didn't even think of making a film. I only began taking notes as if I were conducting my own personal workshop, enticed by the subject. Only later did I realize there was a film here: the relationship between the characters was already vital, with no need of adjustment. Then I began blocking out a script, even before inquiring about film rights. I was more interested in the hand-to-hand conflict, the personal, intimate relationship between literature and life. It was only when I had a series of notes in hand that gave some idea of what a film might be, that I discovered Fanny Ardant had already opted for the film rights after having read the book. She had been initially attracted by its title and fascinated by the portrait of Parise on the cover, without knowing how much Parise had loved Truffaut or that he had done the Italian translation of the dialogue in Jules and Jim.

So the great French actress was equally taken with Parise. What is her role in the film? She certainly has created one of the most extraordinary female characters of the last few decades.

The film depicts an altered marriage, jealousy, exhausted sexual desire and a fresh, new, all-consuming one, and the way the female character, played by Ardant, is drawn to this "diseased" passion. Fanny succeeds brilliantly in conveying her character's mysteriously fragile personality, setting in motion a dramatically original and, for this very reason, all threatening sense of logic.

Why did you want to change the period in which the story takes place?

The film's action is transposed from Rome in the '70s, the years darkened by terrorism, to the equally darkened, disordered, depressed, and even more deeply scarred times of the present day. In the same way the names and professions of the three leads were changed: this was the only way I could be sure of conveying the characters' bourgeois, upper middle class world.

One has the strong impression that this film has a dark side. Is it true?

Yes. The very dilemma of The Scent of Blood is its dark side; our body is the true battleground of our lives. Eros, both manifest and not, is what provides the viewer with a strong point of identification, even if the story doesn't demand it.

One would hardly call it a story with a happy ending...

To the contrary. It's a major tragedy. And it's male obsession that sets it all in motion...

You have certainly never before used the screen with such cold-bloodedness and such explicit eroticism to depict the obsession of love and sex as a cruel game, a desperate search for meaning.

Exclusivity doesn't exist: the characters keep repeating this as if to justify the impossibility of escaping from the disorder of the human condition, of sex, of life, because what happens around us cannot be separated from what happens within.

The film is a Greek tragedy with three characters: their guilt interacts with destiny and everything awful that occurs, occurs offstage. Desire couples with passion, with death, and with the guilty conscious and the pain that so often colours the bond between men and women. Even so, in the end words are the real scandal of the whole affair, as well as its major force.

It's true, words become concrete objects in The Scent of Blood and are used without mediation.

In this way, they lead us into the labyrinth of choices we all have to confront and, in spite of the fact that the story is such a radical one, it's this that triggers the mechanism of a strong personal identification.

The characters express themselves without reserve, attempting to hide nothing.

But this utopia is the risk lovers take when they begin playing at telling the truth!

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