La Noia

Damiano Damiani – 1963 – Italy

The title is Italian for ‘boredom,’ but in America the film was given the bit more poetic title The Empty Canvas.  La Noia is an enjoyable specimen of the risqué international melodramas that came out of Italy in the 60s, often bearing the names of producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, and which delighted in threatening the salacious without ever going too far.  Things would change drastically in a few years, of course, but in the early and middle 60s, it was possible to see big stars in European movies saying and doing things that they then could not in Hollywood productions.  La Noia boasts a surreal assembly of international stars all dubbed into Italian, only to be subtitled into other languages outside of Italy; including German Horst Buchholz, French Catherine Spaak and American Bette Davis.  Buccholz plays Dino, a frustrated painter who tries to live a beatnik’s existence despite being the son of a very wealthy woman (Davis).  Though self-aware enough to acknowledge his lack of genius as an artist, he quickly changes his mind when the beautiful young model of a fellow painter catches his eye, Cecilia (Spaak).  They begin a torrid affair in which Dino becomes increasingly jealous and possessive of the capricious Cecilia.  He even seems to suspect her of being some type of succubus, a femme fatale who victimizes and drains the men in her life, seemingly incapable of actual love.  Whether this is true or not remains unclear as the focus of the story is Dino’s hysteria.  It’s a catalogue of classic male neuroses, ranging from mother fixation to the inability to accept anything less than 24-hour devotion from a romantic partner.  It seems a little pointless to have someone like Bette Davis in the film since she’s robbed of her famous voice, but otherwise, as an erotic, psychological drama, La Noia is entertaining thanks not only to its beautiful locations and actors, but by being so overtly Freudian.