Soraya-Latin Lover part one-

I tre volti (Three Faces of a Woman, 1965) is, among other things, the Antonioni film you're least likely to have seen, the Bolognini film you're least likely to have seen and possibly the only Franco Indovina film you ought to see. It is, as you'll have guessed, a product of that swinging sixties' fad for auteur smorgasboards, compendium films comprising various shorts by various directors, typically including a few great directors collecting their cheques and a couple of up-and-coming nobodies to pad out the numbers. These directorial scrimmages are a bane to collectors, since they're rarely made available on home video. But there seems to be more behind the unavailability of I tre volti. Rumours persist that the Iranian secret police SAVAK once travelled the world, buying up all prints of this arthouse flop, and burning them, until the Cinematheque in Rome housed the only known surviving copy...An astonishing vanity project, or a colossal tax write-off, the film's origins lie shrouded in mystery, and are likely to remain so until someone can get a straight answer from producer Dino DeLaurentiis about what he was thinking of. In other words, we will have to wait until the end of recorded time.

The film's "star," Soraya, around whom the whole thing is constructed like an elaborate gown, had recently divorced the Shah of Iran (hence, perhaps, those print-destroyers) and was well-known as a jet-setting fashionista. Antonioni, for reasons known only to himself and his business manager, directs a segment designed solely to accustom us to the absurd idea of Soraya making a movie. It's a sort of airlock we have to pass through before entering the depths.

Paparazzi eagerly wait the Great Lady's arrival at a a studio situated amid a maze of strip-lit driveways. An array of wigs is laid out on disturbing foam heads. The star arrives in a blur of limos and handlers and the lighting malfunctions around her as if her mere presence were so stellar as to interfere with the flow of electrons.

In a dressing room, we watch the diva transformed from a shiny, frowning millionairess into an immaculately made-up, frowning millionairess. Ushered before the cameras, the divine pseudo-empress receives a phone call from a man in a perspex maze, whose apparent purpose is to illicit emotional responses for the camera. "Things to make you laugh, things to make you talk." She doesn't laugh. She barely talks.

At this moment, two things become clear. The story has no point, and Antonioni is nevertheless doing his best with it. The visual tropes we find in his serious works, freed from the necessity of somehow connecting, however elusively, with theme or narrative, are allowed to run riot, although they can only get so far until pulled back down to earth by the utter pointlessness of the entire exercise, and the fact that Soraya has less screen magnetism than the bit of wood drifting across the surface of a drum full of water in L'eclisse. Seriously, it's not even close.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Sordi
• Indovina
• Princess Soraya

[EmileNolde]

This is from the third part of the Dino DeLaurantiis film I tre Volti staring Soraya.

The intro was directed by Antonioni, the middle by Bolognini and this third one by Indovina, who became Soraya's lover.

It stars the famous comic star Sordi.

All copies of this film were collected and destroyed by Iranian secret service Savak. Only one rushes copy was found amongst Soraya's things after she died . This is now in the Italian National film archive and has been seen by very few people.

[gity100]

ملکه ایران همسر دوم محمد رضا شاه پهلوی.

[SorBill07]

MY GRANDMOTHER'S SIDE OF THE FAMILY IN RUSSIA WAS NAMED SORAYA AND SHE PASSED AWAY IN RUSSIA.

[SorBill07]

I AM SORAYA BILLINGE AND MY MAIDEN NAME ITKIN RUSSIA

[SorBill07]

I AM THE REAL SORAYA BILLINGE......................­....I AM SORAYA I AM SORAYA FROM BUENOS. I SING A TANGO.........SORAYA SINGS A TANGO THAT NO ONE HAS NOT SANG YET.

[darkhyena]

@grecosaurus

All right then. Lets just say his performance in this film isnt golden globe material

[grecosaurus]

@darkhyena Do you really mean that Alberto Sordi, an icon of the Italian cinema, the most famous Italian comic star ever, winner of seven David di Donatello awards as best actor, winner of a Golden Lion award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, winner of a Golden Globe Award and winner of a Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, was a bad actor?

[darkhyena]

Apart from looking like a young Henry Kissinger, the "Latin Lover" is one of the worst actors I've ever seen.