Ultimo incontro

This is another of those Alida Valli films presenting an absolutely hopeless case of a fallen woman desperately trying to extricate herself out of her difficulties, and thereby only involuntarily exacerbating her predicament. However, there is no villain here, except in two brief scenes, making himself solely responsible for unsurveyable dire consequences, but is it possible to blame her for getting into trouble? Her lover is after all Jean-Pierre Aumont, and who can resist an ardent lover like that? You cannot blame Amedeo Nazzari either, his last words, the last words of the film, make a perfectly reasonable seal on the entire film and tragedy, for this is definitely like a Greek tragedy, inevitable, irrevocable in its destiny, and ultimately resolving itself by the strange mechanisms of nemesis. Alida Valli is always worth watching, her female characters are always hopelessly complicated beyond repair, a singular characteristic that Hitchcock used to extreme advantage in "The Paradine Cae", and she is a great actress. That fact and its excellent script and thorough psychology makes this film one of the foremost of Italian moral-psychological films of the 50s, and it is all mainly sustained by Alida Valli.

.