Watch A Quiet Place in the Country For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

What a beautiful movie!

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

After a demented credit sequence, things calm down a bit by presenting Franco Nero in his pants, tied to a chair, while Vanessa Redgrave surrounds him with electric gadgets, including an underwater television which she places between his legs. Vanessa then murders Franco in the shower. It's a typical artist's day.And a dream, thankfully. Franco is having trouble completing any picture these days, and Vanessa, as his wife/manager, is getting rather frustrated that he sits around reading porn and being crazy rather than doing anything else. Worse still, he becomes obsessed with a house he spies in the country (in this film, that means that Franco appears and BECKONS HIMSELF into the house, yep, it's one of 'those' films). Franco loves the house but is rather creeped out by certain rooms near the top, and tells Vanessa that 'there's a ghost in my house' and ghost that wants to kill Vanessa, judging by the things pulling her through the floor and trying to fry her while she's having a shower. This might be the spirit of Wanda, a girl with the fanny of a burst couch judging by the stories the locals tell about her.I'm describing this like it's a straightforward 'vengeful ghost' film, but that's far from the truth as the first twenty minutes involving Franco's daily routine are utterly brain melting, and serves to make you doubt anything you see for the entire duration of the film. Is there actually a ghost at all? Is there a conspiracy against Franco or is he just mental? To top it all, there's about three different unreliable narrators in this film too.And on top of that there's the insane direction and the bizarre Morricone soundtrack. We often see things happen about three times in a row from various angles, like Franco appearing to garrotte his wife, but then not doing that at all, or Franco watching himself painting, or frequently imagining himself as Wanda or one of her lovers, or even a guy that gets murdered. Totally off the wall. Morricone's soundtrack is equally mental, going from AMM style improve to tuneless Resident's piano with slide whistle!This is a stand out film for me. Not a classic, but a good one due to the off-beat direction and the usual solid Nero performance. Aye.

Franco Nero plays a Milan painter whose work is currently quite popular with collectors and commands high prices. His agent, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is also his lover. Thus you have a mix of artistic talent and its value as a monetary commodity that runs like a current through the movie. His obsession with soft-porn magazines reveals other aspects that result in the character of an artist driven by the kinds of internal forces that exert the edgy influences over his art that collectors find irresistible. The idea to find a quiet place in the country in which to produce more art appeals to him, as well as Redgrave, but for apparently entirely different reasons. The place they eventually decide upon is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a beautiful woman who was killed during an air raid in WW2. In a shocking weird seance scene we see or even feel, thanks to the talent of the director and all the other talent involved, her vaguely dangerous ghostly presence. Nero's insanity becomes increasingly clear as he moves psychologically further into the Italian villa with its ghost. On one level the movie is a disturbing look into his soul, but it also an analysis of the interaction of the commercial forces in the market for contemporary art and the troubled artist.

The canny on-screen pairing of Vanessa Redgrave & Franco 'Django' Nero generates some considerable frisson in this taut, atmospheric Italian chiller. This enigmatic, surreal giallo is an unwarranted sleeper since 'a quiet pace in the country' (1969) is a skillfully wrought, eerie treatise on madness; with robust performances from the two attractive leads, assured direction by, Elio Petri and a marvellously evocative and uneasy score from, Ennio Morricone, ensures that this Giallo-Gothic is time well spent. 'A Quiet Place in The Country' sits happily alongside 'Repulsion' & 'The house with laughing windows' in terms of mood, style and uneasy content. (special mention has to be made of the wonderfully Godardian, pop-art title sequence, given considerable pep via Morricone's avaunt-beatnik grooves)

Leonardo Ferri can't paint. He's the toast of the town thanks to his abstract paintings, which fetch incredible prices. He dates the beautiful Flavia, his manager. A collector loans him a luxurious villa in the countryside to work. Life should be easy for Leonardo, but he's going through a creative crisis and having violent nightmares. He gets worse when, after driving aimlessly through the countryside, he discovers an abandoned villa for sale and becomes obsessed with living in it. If he already showed signs of mental instability from the start, the legend of a young countess who died mysteriously there during World War II, finally erases the last vestiges of sanity.Cinema has long loved to explore the relationships between art, creativity and madness. A Quiet Place in the Country was released before Black Swan, The Shining, Robert Altman's Images, and on the same year as Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf, with which it shares a few similarities: distraught painter living in isolation is haunted by things which may or may not be figments of his imagination. Although Bergman's remarkable incursion into horror has achieved a degree of fame, Elio Petri's movie remains undeservedly obscure; the fact that it so perfectly embodies the formula many of the above-mentioned movies still cling to, should make it essential watching for fans of movies about artists going murderously crazy.The first thing one notices is Ennio Morricone's dissonant, deliberately ugly score for the movie. It's loud, clangourous, distorted, and interspersed with metallic noises. It's music meant to disturb and irritate. It gnaws at ones' nerves, predating the score John Williams composed for Images in collaboration with Stomu Yamashta, whose random weird sound effects disrupt the traditional harmony of Williams' compositions. In fact the whole movie is cacophonous from start to finish. The first act in Milan is thundering with urban noises: the indistinct humming of people, the ringing of telephones, the screeching of tires. Ironically, when the action moves to the countryside, it remains equally noise: the omnipresent chirping of birds and droning of critters simply replaces man-made sounds. In spite of the title, there's nothing quiet in the movie, whose frenzied sound wonderfully reflects Leonardo's deranged mind.The dilemma about Leonardo's mental state is that we can never tell whether he's imagining things or whether a ghost is really manipulating him. He's in almost every frame of the movie, meaning the information we get is mediated by his perception. But the way he sees reality is fragmentary, blending the past and present, hallucinations and memories; he imagines fascist soldiers storming the gardens of the villa as he gazes out of a window. Ambiguity builds up until not even the viewer is capable of distinguishing fantasy and reality. It's not unlike the way Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining slowly becomes part of the hotel's history.Elio Petri, famous for the Oscar-winning political parable Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, had a dynamic career. He arguably directed the first movie to talk about the Mafia, We Still Kill The Old Way; he directed Marcello Mastroianni in science fiction and crime movies; he tackled labour rights in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, and his political satire Todo Modo predicted the assassination of Italian prime-minister Aldo Moro. For this horror movie he got together with an excellent cast and crew: the actor Franco Nero, already a star thanks to the Django movies, Vanessa Redgrave, the legendary screenwriter Tonino Guerra (co-author of many movies with Antonioni, Fellini and Tarkovsky), and the underrated cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, who worked with Dario Argento in Deep Red. Knowing the names associated with this movie helps explain why it's such a fascinating work of cinema: the strong colours are the mark of Kuveiller, who could saturate the frame like few cinematographers. And the strangeness of the story owes a lot to Guerra's favourite themes of memory and perception (could we expect less from the screenwriter of Blowup?). That this movie is unique isn't remarkable; that some of the finest filmmakers of their time got together to make it is our luck.Nero also shines in his difficult role and portrays Leonardo's insanity always on the edge of exploding into violence. His feverish, paranoid look greatly enhances the mood and grounds the disparate plot around him. For as much as this movie owes to the absurd and the irrational, it's never a deeply alienating experience thanks to Nero's charisma.A Quiet Place in the Country is a great '60s movie. It drips with sensuality and coolness. Like Blowup, it defines a time and a place. Pop art is much on display throughout the movie, and American pop artist Jim Dine contributed created the paintings used in the finale. Probably shocking for its time because of the sex and violence, it's aged into a very respectable piece of weird cinema that fans of cult movies will want to add to their repertoire.